Kazeon Systems announced the availability of VMware support for its Information Server product line. Version 3.1 of the software fully supports VMware instances and VMware images, and allows customers to discover unknown or hidden virtual instances on servers, laptops and desktops, thus providing discovery, collection, processing, analysis and review capabilities for information stored across these VMware instances, for complete and defensible enterprise-wide eDiscovery. This capability, combined with Kazeon's full-feature eDiscovery suite, is amongst the most complete Information Management software in the marketplace today.

As the usage of VMware and virtual environments has increased rapidly, so has the risk that unidentified and unknown Electronically Stored Information (ESI) is not being thoroughly investigated for eDiscovery. Kazeon's introduction of VMware-aware capabilities now enables corporations, service providers and law firms to collect information from a wide range of data sources and repositories across geographic distributions of corporations, and provides an auditable means of performing eDiscovery across all ESI in physical or virtual storage devices. The complete eDiscovery set of capabilities thus ensures thorough, accurate and relevant early-case assessments for corporations as well as efficient, in-place first-pass review for case matters.

Kazeon's innovative VMware support and ability to guarantee thorough and defensible eDiscovery has evoked industry analyst interest and endorsement. "With the popularity and rapid adoption of server virtualization, more and more information is stored in virtual machines. Traditional eDiscovery products and methods have not evolved sufficiently and can potentially miss out on important, relevant and incomplete information associated with a legal matter that is contained in unknown or deliberately hidden virtual environments. Kazeon's auto-discovery capability and its in-place analysis and collection prowess in VMware environments is what corporations need to guarantee completeness, thoroughness and defensibility of their eDiscovery and litigation support processes," said Arun Taneja, Taneja Group.

Kazeon's platform empowers corporations to automatically discover ESI in unknown or hidden virtual machines, and analyzes ESI in-place and collects relevant information from these sources in an agent-less fashion. The new functionality is a key enhancement for helping corporations, service providers and law firms streamline their discovery, collection, processing, analysis and review methods for proactive and reactive eDiscovery processes to ensure that they discover all relevant and necessary information for any litigation related activity without data spoliation and modifications to metadata attributes of files and emails. The Kazeon platform supports VMware ESX and ACE environments on Windows XP, Vista and other versions on servers, laptops and desktops.

"Kazeon's strong capabilities for VMware environments are not only convenient for IT departments but more importantly, they provide fool-proof, defensible and thorough eDiscovery capabilities starting from auto-discovery through processing, analysis and review for corporations," said Karthik Kannan, vice president of marketing and business development, Kazeon. "Legal departments can now be rest assured that all their relevant data sources, physical and virtual, are being discovered, processed and analyzed for eDiscovery, and optionally legally held using KazHold either in-place or in secure, target repositories," added Kannan.