Four vendors - CommVault, Mimosa Systems, Data Domain and Fios - are adding to the hubbub around e-discovery with the addition of capabilities to their products.

CommVault last week announced a new Legal Hold capability for its Simpana 7.0 software suite. Legal Hold spans both archive and backup stores and profiles an audit trail of relevant information, allowing customers to reduce risks and comply with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The capability allows an IT manager to search and retrieve data from backups and archives and retain a subset of the information for accessibility.

Data Domain rolled out a Retention Lock software option that lets IT lock files for regulatory governance. Working in concert with Data Domain’s deduplication appliances, the software lets IT managers store deduplicated files in an unalterable state for a specified length of time. Retention periods can be set for files and files tagged with retention locks can not be changed or deleted by users. Retention Lock can be applied to any file whether it is on backup, archive or nearline storage.

Further, Mimosa Systems introduced support of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard dictated in the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) for the transfer of electronically stored information throughout the e-discovery process. XML provides a standard format for the exchange of content and metadata between different applications, systems and organizations. EDRM XML will be supported within Mimosa’s NearPoint system.

Finally, Fios rolled out native support for Gmail and Google Chat files. With this capability, files don’t need to be converted to Microsoft Outlook PST format.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.