Always-on Availability to Support Critical Legal Work

Overview

Challenge

• Ensure constant data availability to support thousands of attorneys working on cases around the clock and across the world.

Solution

• Upgrade block and file storage by deploying Hitachi VSP 5600 in their data centers and Hitachi VSP One Block arrays across remote offices worldwide.

Outcome

• Maximize availability, boost performance and increase capacity, while reducing costs per terabyte with a 6.5:1 data reduction ratio.

Challenge

This large law firm is a leader in the United States, with over 1,000 attorneys in offices nationwide. Legal professionals work long hours and missing a deadline is not an option. The IT infrastructure underpinning operations has to be rock-solid and available around the clock. In the event of an IT outage, disaster recovery has to be rapid and reliable to ensure that no data is lost, and that employees are not blocked from billable work.

“We have attorneys working day and night across multiple time zones,” explains a spokesperson for the firm. “If they can’t access the systems and documents they need for even a relatively short period, that’s a loss of potentially millions of dollars in billable hours.”

The firm has relied on Hitachi Vantara storage technology for over 15 years, with Hitachi VSP F1500 arrays at its two main data centers in Boston and Chicago and Hitachi VSP N400 network-attached storage (NAS) systems at four remote data centers. This infrastructure had proven robust over the years, but it was now coming to its end of support life.

“We try to stay ahead of technology developments, and we aim to do storage refreshes every five to seven years,” their spokesperson says. “It was time for an upgrade, and we felt we could trust Hitachi to once again deliver the excellent availability and performance we need, while staying cost-efficient.”

Solution

The Hitachi team and Hitachi partner Stone Creek Technologies ran a number of workshops and technical demos with the law firm’s IT team, ultimately helping them select a pair of VSP 5600 arrays to replace the aging VSP F1500 architecture in its central data centers. By using Hitachi TrueCopy technology for continuous synchronous replication across the two sites, the firm maintains a high level of data protection in case of a disaster scenario.

Stone Creek supported the installation and migration process, using VMware vMotion to move around 1PB of data from its VMware environment into the new arrays. “Stone Creek is a wealth of Hitachi knowledge,” says their spokesperson. “They are a breath of fresh air compared to other resellers, and we truly enjoy working with them.”

Seeing the performance boost and reliability provided by the VSP 5600 arrays, the law firm geared up to also replace their VSP N400 NAS storage at their remote offices. After trialing the VSP One Block 26 during an early access testing period, the firm was impressed with the new arrays’ hardware-level advanced data reduction (ADR) feature, as well as the dynamic drive protection (DDP) groups which boost scalability by enabling one-drive-at-a-time upgrades.

The company decided to use the VSP One Block 26 as its central file storage platform, while also deploying VSP One Block 24 arrays at each of its four remote locations. This second stage of the upgrade was particularly seamless for the firm. “The VSP One has the quickest and simplest installation and set-up of any array we’ve ever used,” their spokesperson said.

Outcome

With the new Hitachi arrays in place at both its central and remote locations, the law firm has a storage platform that provides the reliability, availability, performance and capacity it needs to support over 1,000 elite lawyers across the United States.

“The performance of the new arrays is excellent, just as we expected based on our experience with our previous Hitachi platforms,” says their spokesperson. “Our workloads run faster, and the data center footprint is smaller too, which means we are spending less on power and cooling.”

At the same time, the company has gained significant storage headroom with the Hitachi ADR feature on its VSP 5600 arrays. “When Hitachi launched its adaptive data reduction capabilities for primary storage, we knew the technology would be solid,” notes the spokesperson. “But we weren’t expecting a 6.5:1 compression ratio. We now have much more space for future growth.” The firm is also seeing between 4:1 and 8:1 data reduction ratios on its VSP One Block arrays.

Furthermore, with Hitachi’s 100% data availability guarantee supported by TrueCopy replication technology, the firm can be sure that its employees will always have access to the data they need, helping them serve clients efficiently and avoid any loss of billable hours.

Finally, the partnership provided by Hitachi and Stone Creek ensures effective ongoing support for the law firm. “Hitachi is the only vendor where I am still on a first-name basis with the engineers,” concludes their spokesperson. “Support quality means a lot to us, and the fact that Hitachi doesn’t outsource that service to third parties says it all. Between Stone Creek and Hitachi, we can always get any issues resolved very quickly.”