When Al Coppolo was asked by lawyers at the KeyCorp operating unit to produce old e-mails for litigation or regulatory compliance reasons, he would have as many as four members of his IT team trudge to an offsite storage facility to retrieve tapes, then mount them on servers and painstakingly search for the requested messages.

"It was a completely manual environment," said Coppolo, who is executive vice president and director of infrastructure at Cleveland-based KeyBank. "Sometimes we would have to look through multiple copies of the same e-mail on multiple tapes if there were multiple replies."

The process was so laborious and time-consuming that usually his team just barely met a 30-day internal deadline for producing e-mails. And, Coppolo noted, the number of legal requests was only growing. Moreover, new federal e-discovery rules went into effect in December that spelled out requirements for submitting electronic documents -- including e-mail and instant messaging logs -- as evidence in civil court cases.

There are several technology alternatives available to companies looking for help. KeyBank opted for a full-blown archiving and content management system to support its 300TB e-mail archive.

The bank looked at several records management products, including one developed by iLumin Software Services Inc., which now is owned by CA Inc. But KeyBank settled on AXS-One Inc.'s namesake software, which it bought from Sun Microsystems Inc. as part of a compliance and content management product bundle.