Law Firm Barlow Robbins Selects MTI Technology

Barlow Robbins LLP is a
law firm based in the south east of England, with a portfolio of both private
and commercial clients.

The law firm has 20 partners and over 160 staff. From its Surrey
offices, based in Guildford, Woking and Godalming, the company provides a range of legal services to clients nationally and internationally.

Barlow Robbins is recognised as one of the top three legal
advisors to independent schools and is a specialist in services to the mortgage
lending market.

The Challenge
Law firms are facing challenges and increasing
workloads, but at the same time are under pressure to streamline their efforts,
mitigate risks and reduce costs. Barlow Robbins had been running on a legacy IT
infrastructure with ageing hardware and systems that had not been refreshed for
six years. Rather than replacing its systems, the firm had been looking at ways
to be more resourceful and efficient by leveraging its ageing system and
putting plaster fixes across its network. It realised it needed an upgrade of its entire system in order to improve performance and
efficiency.

Jon Williams, network manager at Barlow Robbins, realised that installing an
industry technology platform, which would refresh and simplify the overall
management of the company’s IT systems, was required to achieve this. Williams
was intent on extending Barlow Robbins’ DR capabilities to encompass all of its
systems, while ease of management was also a critical requirement.

Williams said: "A key challenge for
legal firms is the limited support resource available; as legal IT departments
do not typically receive the same level of resource as other industries.
Therefore it was imperative to simplify the overall management of our IT
systems so that I could focus my attention on delivering the most value from
our legal systems.

"In addition to this, the legal
industry is faced with various regulatory and compliance requirements which
require us to retain all client data for seven years. This in itself can be a
challenge as we are dealing with multiple sources of client information, which
means our backup retention policies and processes have to be extremely
thorough. Prior to the implementation by MTI Technology Ltd, our backup window had grown to 36 hours
spanning across five tapes. A robust archiving and backup solution that would
help us to meet our regulatory requirements and reduce the costs associated
with backups and administration was a key requirement."

The Solution
MTI carried out a complete refresh of Barlow Robbins’ IT systems.
The implementation included installing an EMC VNX 5300 SAN at the law firm’s
Guildford and Working sites, both with fast, local and remote protection. With
only a third of its servers virtualised, the MTI team also installed a Quantum
i40 tape library and enabled Barlow Robbins to virtualise all of its remaining
servers.

MTI supplied Barlow Robbins with Veeam backup and reporting, Brocade DS300
switches, HP servers and de-duplicated all of its corporate data. All of the
solutions provided were covered by MTI’s three-year 24×7 support.

Williams said: "The main objective
was to extend our datacentre over two sites so that it was no longer running in
an active / passive state. Previously, our DR kit had just sat idle collecting
dust. Now we have access to certain services all of the time from each site,
thereby seeing a ROI as much as possible."

The Benefits
The deployed solution enables Barlow Robbins to backup all of its
data within an hour and a half, shrinking its backup window by around 400%. The law firm is able to streamline business processes, whilst ensuring
compliance with policies. Unstructured and structured client information can
now be stored on a single tape, rather than five, which increases
Williams’ ease of management.

Barlow Robbins’ previous solution for DR and business continuity was a
host-based replication. In the event that it lost contact with its primary
datacentre the failover to the backup would take around four hours. Initial
insight with the new system in place suggests that the failover time will be
about half an hour, just one eighth of the previous solution.

Williams said: "From a purely legal
perspective, the main benefit has been resource application of our legal
systems. This time last year I was probably spending up to 40 per cent of my
time hand-holding and gently massaging systems. This has now been reduced to as
little as 5 per cent. It basically means that I can now sleep easier.

"The configuration given by the MTI
team means that I can just leave it and never have to touch it. If there is a
problem with the kit, it is automatically logged with MTI and they contact me,
which has been fantastic. For example, within the first couple of weeks MTI
logged a problem with me even though there hadn’t been any adverse effect on
our system. Had it not been flagged and remained unnoticed it certainly would
have resulted in system downtime."

Barlow Robbins had many disparate systems to manage, with each carrying direct
individual costs. The implemented solution has already created a
15% reduction in the legal firms’ operational expenditure costs this financial
year. As well as a reduction in operation costs Barlow Robbins is benefiting
from improved client services and productivity as a result of the legacy
systems upgrade.