ZANTAZ extends eDiscovery support to VMware

Quoting from the ZANTAZ official announcement:

Autonomy ZANTAZ, a leader in the archiving, eDiscovery and policy management markets, today announced its unique ability to discover electronically stored information (ESI) in all virtual environments, including those powered by VMWare, further extending its lead in eDiscovery. In order for companies to be compliant with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), eDiscovery software must be able to find and hold all information relevant to litigation, including more complex file types such as virtual images, multimedia attachments, voice, video, IM and blackberry messages.

Autonomy ZANTAZ’s Introspect software enables customers to quickly and accurately survey, assess and discover all information in virtual environments, without the manual and complicated process of logging into each virtual server environment to search the contents. Introspect’s Collector module can simultaneously search multiple virtual file servers running multiple operating systems, enabling native file ingestion of content relevant to litigation. This provides substantial savings in time and effort to organizations’ eDiscovery initiatives and increases their ability to be FRCP compliant…

While the fact that forensic suites starts to be virtualization-aware, it’s worth to note that this ZANTAZ announcement is misleading: both VMware and Microsoft (along with all the others virtualization vendors supporting the Microsoft VHD format) allow customers to mount any virtual machine image at host level, without the need to start the virtual machine and logging inside the guest OS.

This allows a manual or automatic inventory of the guest OS exactly like the host one. For free.