Leveraging DR-Scout: Howard Rice Lowers TCO and Streamlines Backups with a Disaster Recovery Solution Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin P.C. is a San Francisco-based law firm with leading national and international practices, representing entities and individuals across a comprehensive range of practice areas.
Case Study: Howard Rice
Leveraging DR-Scout: Howard Rice Lowers TCO and Streamlines Backups with a Disas-ter Recovery SolutionHoward Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin P.C. is a San Francisco-based law firm with leading national and international practices, representing entities and individuals across a comprehensive range of practice areas. Founded in 1954, the firm's clients include such companies as Citigroup Global Markets, Inc., Google, Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., The Oakland Raiders, and Sony Online Entertainment. As the firm's data grew at an exponential rate, it became critical to implement a backup and disaster recovery solution that could keep up with its demands. The compliance directives inherent to the legal industry also require the highest data protection standards. The Challenge: Shrinking Backup Windows and Rising TCO Howard Rice's information technology infrastructure is centralized in its San Francisco headquarters. The platform environ-ment is Microsoft-centric, with a moderate amount of Linux. HP/Compaq servers are primarily used, along with high density network-attached storage (NAS) appliances from Network Appliance. As the firm's total storage capacity rapidly approached 12 TB from a current capacity of 10 TB, this created shrinking backup windows that impacted the performance of other busi-ness systems and overall employee productivity. "Our business drivers were twofold: First, we needed a disaster recovery solution to replicate data in real time," says Matt Reynolds, CIO of Howard Rice. "The traditional tape backup restoration we had in place was not meeting our needs. The firm's data is growing at such an exponential rate that backups were running well into business hours, resulting in degrada-tion of business systems. For example, even though MS Exchange was well tuned, backups were extending well into the business day. While this was relatively transparent to Firm personnel, the IT Team was well aware of the degradation. We shut the backups down to confirm they were the problem, and indeed system performance picked up. So we had to create a backup strategy that would be transparent to all Firm personnel. The second driver was reducing the total cost of owner-ship of our backup strategy -this included hardware, software and labor costs."The Solution: InMage Systems' DR-ScoutHoward Rice spent nearly an entire year reviewing DR offerings from vendors including Santa Clara-based InMage Systems and three of its competitors. Reynolds was looking for certain features, including a product's ability to provide real-time, bit-level, bi-directional data replication at a very granular level. "We knew real-time data replication would mitigate risk management - a proactive versus 'after the fact' consideration in the legal industry," continues Reynolds. "Legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley did impact our decision. We also had to con-sider our clients and their regulatory requirements that are indirectly or directly imposed on us. By casting a wide net, we could meet retention needs."Howard Rice purchased InMage's flagship DR-Scout software, a combined disaster recovery and business continuity solution. Based on patent-pending continuous data protection (CDP) technology, DR-Scout addresses disaster recovery, continuous local backup and application availability. The firm began a three-phase implementation beginning with proof of concept. Reynolds identified the level one business systems imperative to its day to day business, including accounting, MS Exchange and document management, and also identified a DR site. "After combining DR-Scout's sophisticated reporting with our own quality control checking of data on the target site, we con-firmed the proof of concept was rock solid," says Reynolds. "Phase two marked the addition of our level two business sys-tems to DR-Scout, and included non-critical but essential systems such as records management, calendar, docketing, and HR systems. We can add servers at the host or target site with ease, cost-effectively expanding our infrastructure as our business needs and requirements evolve." Continues Reynolds, "We disclosed early on to InMage that we are a growing VMware shop, and we wanted our green initia-tive to impact IT by consolidating servers to the greatest extent possible. We are hosting multiple servers on one box using VMware, and our licensing structure is such. Another benefit of DR-Scout is that it is a portable solution. We knew our ... [download for more]
