EMC VPLEX Helps Law Firm Katten Muchin Rosenman

EMC Corporation announced that
Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, a Chicago-based law firm with 600 attorneys, has
standardized on EMC technologies and deployed VPLEX virtual storage
technology to transform to an active/active data center.

Active/active data centers enable customers to pool two data centers together
to enable mobility, availability and collaboration for their data without
disruption. This approach enables Katten to move the processing and storage
of running Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange and other enterprise applications
across data centers. It relies on VPLEX to relocate data and applications
between data centers resulting in zero downtime and minimal engineering
resources, faster delivery of IT resources, and affordable enterprise BC.

Customer Benefits:

Availability: VPLEX enabled Katten to
migrate 250 live systems and 150TB of data to a new data center location 25
miles away in 15 seconds and with zero downtime – contrast to the full
week of downtime and one third more staff to achieve the same prior to
VPLEX.
Business Agility: Katten is able to respond to business demands by delivering IT
services to support new applications in 40 minutes compared to several weeks in
its previous IT environment.
Efficiency: Katten has
increased utilization of resources and performs maintenance and upgrades
without downtime while employing a business continuity.

Customer Challenges and Solution:
As Katten moved and expanded its data centers to address the company’s
growth, its IT staff was consumed with planning and executing data migrations
that involved hundreds of systems and would have required extended downtime – up
to a full week for certain systems. Not only would these events disrupt their
attorneys’ ability to serve clients, but it would have also diminished IT’s
ability to respond to fast-changing business requirements.

To improve data protection and business agility, Katten deployed
EMC VPLEX Metro in its production data center and a DR facility. It also
leverages VPLEX to create an active/active data center, which balanced
workloads across multiple sites for optimal resource utilization and delivers
new IT services faster and efficiently.

Katten runs a suite of enterprise applications, including Microsoft SQL
Server stretch clusters and Exchange, as well as 200 VMware virtual machines.
Approximately 85-90% of its infrastructure is virtualized with VMware vSphere,
with VMware vSphere vMotion to move live virtual machines between its two data
centers.

Alexander Diaz, enterprise development manager, Katten,
said: "For a major data center
migration, we were able to move a running virtual machine across our cloud to
the new data center 25 miles away in about 15 to 20 seconds with VPLEX and
vMotion. With VPLEX’s capabilities, I have confidence that we could move the
data across an even further distances should our data center needs evolve over
time.

"VPLEX kept the storage
in synch in both data centers. Four engineers moved 30 to 40 virtual machines
the first weekend and then gradually moved over 250 systems during the next
three weeks. The servers stayed up the whole time and no one in the firm knew
that we had migrated our entire data center. The ‘old’ way would have meant
days or up to a week of downtime for certain systems and a dozen engineers
working around the clock.

"VPLEX has allowed us to
raise the bar and provide our firm with enterprise-class business
continuity-and a truly active/active data center model. Using the VPLEX for our
virtual machines and stretch clusters, we can do maintenance and upgrades on
hardware whenever it’s needed without any downtime. We’re also getting more
utilization out of our infrastructure by balancing workloads across multiple
sites.

"When someone in the firm needs
a new application, we’re expected to respond quickly. EMC technologies along
with virtualization enable us to bring up a new system in about 40
minutes-start to finish. Before, it would take weeks. Sometimes our users think
it is magic, so you could say VPLEX gave us a special wand to get the job done."