About Reed Smith LLP
With nearly 1,600 attorneys and 22 offices, Reed Smith is one of the largest law firms in the world. BTI Consulting Group ranked Reed Smith #1 among more than 400 law firms for building and maintaining client relationships with large-scale clients.
Challenge
The firm represents many of the world's leading companies in complex litigation and other high-stakes disputes, cross-border and other strategic transactions and crucial regulatory matters. In this intense environment, 100 percent uptime is essential. "Every minute of downtime affects billable hours, and impacts trial preparations," said Geoff Grayson, server team lead for Reed Smith LLP. "We have a reputation for exemplary service, and maintaining the reliability of our computing environment plays an important role in service delivery."
In response to tremendous business growth outside the U.S., Reed Smith established centralized data centers in Asia and Europe, and needed a fail-safe disaster recovery solution for all of its centers. "There was a pressing demand for high availability," said Grayson. "We were striving to achieve application-level failover between data centers to ensure business continuity in case of a server outage. We had been using a SAN boot drive for disaster recovery but since we had newer hardware at our European and Asian data centers, the solution was no longer image compatible. We needed a hardware agonistic solution."
The firm found PlateSpin® Protect was the only solution on the market that fulfilled their needs. "We knew PlateSpin Protect would give us the data recovery protection we needed, regardless of what type of hardware resided in each data center," said Grayson. "We also recognized the value in PlateSpin Protect's ability to quickly failover and failback, as this was something we envisioned needing in the future."
Novell Solution
Server team lead Geoff Grayson had a positive experience working with PlateSpin products at his previous job, and was equally pleased with the solution in this environment. "Novell provided on-site training, which went very well," Grayson said. "Having someone guide us and provide hands-on experience with the console was invaluable."
Reed Smith soon deployed PlateSpin Protect for all of its tier 1 applications, including litigation, messaging, Microsoft SQL Server and document management software, on its Windows-based servers. "We use PlateSpin Protect in a 'hub-and-spoke' disaster recovery solution," said Grayson. "The product is housed at our Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania center, which serves as a disaster recovery site. In case of a server outage elsewhere, we can use PlateSpin Protect to run up-to-date backup virtual machines in Pittsburgh until the server can be restored. At that point, we can automatically failback the same workloads to the new or repaired server."
The firm also found PlateSpin products beneficial when performing hardware refreshes and migrating to virtual machines running on VMware ESX. "Using PlateSpin Migrate, we were able to conduct 100 physical-to-physical and 100-physical-to-virtual migrations with virtually no downtime," said Grayson. "Without PlateSpin Migrate, we would have had to rebuild and migrate servers, which would have caused significant disruption to our users. Instead, we were able to migrate everything at once, as opposed to standing up a new environment and migrating it piecemeal, which would have taken upwards of six months."
With a diverse array of hardware platforms, Reed Smith found PlateSpin Migrate particularly helpful. "We need to support everything from hardware that's four years old to new HP blade servers," said Grayson. "PlateSpin Migrate's conversion capabilities add value in this area," said Grayson. "The software is flexible and extremely easy to use. It's a quick and easy solution for migrating all our servers."
Results
By implementing PlateSpin Protect, Reed Smith gained a seamless disaster recovery solution for all its servers. "Had we not had PlateSpin Protect, we would have had no way to recover data for our older servers without maintaining an identical backup server, which is simply unfeasible," said Grayson. "With PlateSpin Protect, we can recover multiple sites with the same set of hardware quite easily, in a matter of minutes."
The virtualization benefits were equally impressive. "We reduced our footprint by 20 percent by easily migrating from physical to virtual servers," said Grayson. "Without PlateSpin Migrate, we wouldn't be able to leverage VMware to its fullest extent, and we would have fewer virtualized servers."
The software also saved the firm considerably in labor costs. "Using PlateSpin Migrate, we realized a huge savings in moving from physical to virtual machines," said Grayson. "We were able to perform physical-to-virtual migrations in a third of the time. And we could migrate multiple servers concurrently for added time savings."
Based on the initial success, Reed Smith now plans to use PlateSpin Migrate when it refreshes hardware in its European data center.