Florida Firm Ensures 100% System Availability and Stands Up to Hurricane Wilma

CA
December 9, 2008 | COMMENTS

Ruden McClosky is a full-service law firm, providing a complete range of legal services and business solutions for clients throughout Florida, the United States, Latin America, and beyond.

With its primary data center located in Florida, one of the country's hotbeds for extreme weather, the company was very concerned about risk management. It wanted to gain greater efficiencies in its day-to-day backup operations; with over 50 Windows-based servers and 600 workstations spread across 10 offices, and over 600 e-mail accounts, there was a lot to back up.

Management decided to install a reliable disaster recovery plan. It also recognized it would be a good opportunity to consolidate infrastructure and improve WAN communications across its networked locations.

“We saw some real gaps in how we were, and were not, protecting the firm's data, and how we were providing access to that data. We wanted to seal those gaps,” said Ben Weinberger, director of IT for Ruden McClosky.

A recovery management solution was implemented that included the establishment of a secondary data center in Chicago , which now serves as the firm's failover site. In addition, dynamic data replication is conducted 24/7/365 with the help of WAN acceleration technology. Other benefits include reducing WAN traffic and eliminating storage redundancy, accelerating TCP-based applications, and optimizing other applications that weren't originally designed for WAN use.

The IT team now performs backups at a fraction of the time it had taken before. The company has experienced an average WAN capacity increase of 460% and reported 100% data and system availability during one of Florida's worst recent storms – Hurricane Wilma. Staff conducts dynamic replication around-the-clock to ensure system availability and uptime, day and night, and provide on-demand data recovery.

“We were also able to consolidate two separate Microsoft Exchange (e-mail) servers (each of which stored approximately 250GB of data) down to one,” said Weinberger, “which now provides e-mail services firm-wide. So, even capital expenditures and licensing fees are down.”

This executive summary is from a white paper by CA entitled “Florida Law Firm Cuts Backup Time, Ensures 100% System Availability and Stands Up to Hurricane Wilma.” Read the complete document online here.