28 October 2008

Norton Rose headquarters is based within the More London development

London-based global law firm Norton Rose is working with Data Domain to consolidate and automate its backup, restore and disaster recovery processes.

The firm is using Data Domain’s deduplication storage systems across 20 regional offices, as well as in its headquarters and UK-based data centre. IT staff cite faster and more reliable regional office backups via WAN-based replication, improved recovery time objectives (RTO), and extended retention of data on nearline disk as benefits which led to its purchasing decision. It says that by using Data Domain systems, the IT department can now meet local and global service level agreements (SLA) not attainable with its previous tape-based practices.

Norton Rose maintains offices across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Applications such as client practice software, finance, HR and operations are managed through the production data centre, and mirrored to the disaster recovery (DR) site. However, Microsoft Exchange e-mail and document management servers were installed and backed up locally using a combination of conventional disk arrays and a tape device through Symantec Backup Exec. In total, IT department manages more than 200 terabytes of application data.

This growth has led to increased data demands on the production EMC storage area networks (SANs) and the challenges were magnified at the regional sites, which in many cases lack IT resources to administer tape backups. Head of systems delivery Malcolm Todd needed to consolidate and automate the firm's Exchange server backups as a business-critical application. “Our tape backup process could no longer meet performance and recovery objectives and we were draining way too many resources manually backing up and shipping tapes to our production site,” he said. “DR exercises could take days to get a simulated office up and running while we waited for tapes to arrive – a totally unacceptable situation.”

Norton Rose is rolling out a combination of systems, all with Data Domain Replicator software, including DD565s with ES20 expansion shelves in the production data centre and DR site, and DD530s, DD510s and DD120s fanned across its regional offices – 22 purchased systems in all. “Other data reduction systems were much more expensive, complicated to administer and created a much larger footprint,” said Todd. “We are impressed by Data Domain's scalable architecture, easy integration and management, and that it is a field-proven and mature solution.”

The Data Domain deployment allows the firm almost to eliminate tape from its backup and DR processes, and Todd can now keep four weeks of backups at regional sites and 13 weeks of retained backups at the production datacentre. Todd adds, “Our target for an international site recovery was a four hour RTO for Exchange and document management servers. Allied with other technologies and approaches, I am now confident that we can meet a four hour total site rebuild SLA at any of our regional offices and have most systems up within 60 minutes. In London, our recovery of key systems is proven to an RTO of 15 minutes and full site recovery in four hours.”

“Equally important to us is the greater reliability and speed of backups so that we can be confident that our data is fully secured worldwide and quickly recoverable in any conceivable situation,” Todd continues.

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