Case Studies
Case Studies

EVault InfoStage™ rids East Coast law firm of tape "evils"

Sean Scott, CIO of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, frequently would go to bed wondering if his data backup tasks would be completed when he got to the office the following morning.

Scott's late-night concerns focused squarely on the inefficiencies of his law firm's legacy tape-based backup system. The tape solution in place was causing both excessive equipment expenditures as well as high manpower costs to manually administer backups across nine offices in the Southeast U.S. As a top-100 law firm in the country, Scott's group supports the IT needs of 450 attorneys, 750 other employees and a stable of high-profile clients.

As Scott evaluated replacement backup technology, his priority was to implement a cost-effective, disk-based solution that would centralize backup management into the firm's Winston-Salem, N.C. headquarters, provide a much higher degree of reliability– especially with restores, and free up IT resources to tackle other pressing needs.

Scott made what he called "a very easy decision" by selecting the EVault InfoStage™ UltraRecovery backup and recovery software solution. The disk-to-disk software solution was chosen to back up its Microsoft servers storing email and traditional files and folders as well as replicate the information to a secondary vault for added disaster recovery capability. During and since the installation, Scott says he has also enjoyed working with EVault's customer support organization who provided timely answers to questions that arose.

Immediate Reliability Improvement

Soon after installing EVault InfoStage software, Womble Carlyle realized significant reliability improvement both in its nightly backup jobs and their file and folder restores. EVault InfoStage Agents, which are installed on the servers requiring backup, "wake up" at administrator-set times.

Leveraging EVault DeltaPro™ technology, the agents scan for and then back up only new and altered files since the previous backup. As a software component of EVault InfoStage, EVault DeltaPro takes those changes, assembles into an operating system-independent file format, compresses and then encrypts the data before being sent over the network. This automated process provided Scott's team with several advantages not previously realized. Primarily, Scott was relieved that his staff no longer had to conduct manual tasks such as labeling and rotating tapes or dealing with equally unreliable tape automation equipment.

"I can't tell you how many times we've gone to conduct a restore and the tape is either faulty or we had a problem loading it,""Dealing with the tape changers was equally evil."

In the remote offices, where Scott had less control over IT processes, backup tasks were no longer subject to human error or unsecured practices (e.g. tape handling). The encryption included in the EVault DeltaPro technology provides additional peace of mind that the confidential attorney-client data can not be tampered with or accessed should the network be intruded. This advanced encryption technology provides security – whether data is being backed up to the central office or replicated out to a secondary vault.

Centralization improves management, lowers manpower costs

In addition to its North Carolina headquarters, Womble Carlyle has eight offices in the Southeast from northern Virginia to Atlanta. With the firm's previous tape-based backup solution, each remote office would have one IT staff member dedicated to spending about a half a day each week administering backup tasks—that is when things went well. On too many occasions, four or five hours of troubleshooting were required.

With storage management costs widely recognized to be five to 10 times higher than accompanying hardware, Scott wanted a policy-based data protection and recovery process that would eliminate as much human intervention as possible. After installing EVault InfoStage software on the remote servers, automated agents now initiate backup tasks instead of manual steps being taken by IT staff. By centralizing and automating backup management, Womble Carlyle's remote IT staff plays a diminished role in backups and is able to provide more support to other areas of the firm. Backup and recovery-related tasks such as conducting file/folder restores have been reduced from being the part-time job of eight people to a part-time job of one person.

File/folder restore times significantly lowered

The speed with which businesses need to return to operations (RTO) has created a greater demand for easier and faster recovery of electronic data. Additional concerns related to terrorism and government regulations have caused more companies to take advantage of disk-based backup solutions that deliver these results.

Womble Carlyle IT staff is consistently being asked to retrieve data accidentally deleted or lost. While the requests were regular, the tape-based recovery process was anything but routine. Depending on the age of the data, it was not unusual for administrators to have to contact a tape storage facility, pay for expensive declarations and courier costs and then search to get the data off the tape. Once the EVault InfoStage was deployed, instead of picking up the phone, administrators use an intuitive user interface and find the file in minutes.

"We really have seen a savings of time in restores. With tape, it could take 45 minutes up to half a day to find something. Now we're seeing the average restore taking from five to 15 minutes."

Conclusion

The centralization and automation of backup tasks enabled Womble Carlyle to move away from having the constraints and shortcoming of its legacy backup system, which dictated the firm's backup and recovery processes. Using EVault InfoStage, Womble Carlyle gained greater operational control of its data protection tasks and faster and easier restores. In doing so, the firm enjoyed significant productivity gains in IT and spends less time worrying about, and fixing, their backup.

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