Law Firm Lathrop & Gage Consolidates on CommVault Simpana

Lathrop
& Gage LLP, considered the oldest continuously operating law firm west
of the Mississippi River, replaced three separate software products for
snapshot management, replication, backup and recovery, virtual server
protection and DR, by consolidating on the CommVault Simpana 9 software
platform.

More than 750 employees, including 325 attorneys across 11 offices coast to
coast, now have confidence in their IT team’s ability to safeguard data and
client files as well as applications, encompassing document management, legal
discovery and litigation support.

Lathrop & Gage relies on
hardware-based snapshots to meet expectations for rapid application recovery
and has integrated multiple snapshot management solutions into one. By taking
advantage of CommVault’s IntelliSnap snapshot management technology and VMware
integration, the firm has improved its virtual server protection, safeguarding
hundreds of virtual machines in minutes. Full backups, which once took three to
four days to complete, now can be performed in less than one day.

The firm now has the ability to
automatically snapshot all of its tier-one applications, including crucial
systems that drive law-firm operations. Lathrop & Gage is now snapshotting
close to 80% of its environment with improved reliability. Thanks to
CommVault’s embedded deduplication, 30-day retention of all backups is accomplished and the firm has realized a 30x snapshot space savings by reducing
300TBs of snapshot data to 10TBs of deduplicated snapshots.

Centralized management yields reduction in administration and capacity requirements
Managing disparate data protection
platforms overburdened the firm’s three-member team responsible for data
protection, especially as successful backups and restores became ‘hit or
miss’. Moreover, it became exceedingly difficult to ensure that Lathrop
& Gage’s environment, which was 90% virtualized, could keep pace with
ongoing expansion and dynamic workloads. In particular, the team experienced
persistent problems performing snapshots of its VMware environment, highlighted
by an incident where they couldn’t recover a virtual machine.

To alleviate its backup and recovery pain,
Lathrop & Gage replaced Symantec Backup Exec, Veeam and Double-Take
software with Simpana software, consolidating all its data protection
requirements on a unified platform. In doing so, the firm was able to realize performance
improvements in backing up and recovering 70TBs of data while single console management slashed administrative time from approximately 30
hours to about two hours each week.

Capacity licensing, deduplication &
virtual server protection provide power for attorneys
CommVault’s capacity licensing model made
it easy for Lathrop & Gage to take advantage of functionality for
backup, recovery, deduplication, snapshot management and replication in an
economical way. Additionally, this model, which offers a simple price per terabyte,
accommodates separate agents for the firm’s SQL, Exchange,
Active Directory, NDMP and SharePoint data.

The combination of CommVault’s capacity
licensing and single console management helped Lathrop & Gage embrace the
benefits of data management without increasing the cost, time and effort
to manage its integrated processes. Not only does it take less administration
to oversee operations, it requires less time to perform backups and restores.

"Like
many organizations today, Lathrop & Gage faces the challenge of managing
and protecting data in a highly virtualized, geographically dispersed
environment, which can be a complex proposition when using legacy tools or
point solution," said David West , SVP of WW marketing and business
development at CommVault. "CommVault
is focused on enabling anywhere, anytime recovery of applications and data to
help customers attain rapid ROI through centralized operations and advanced
technologies like snapshot management."

"There
are no excuses when it comes to data protection. Fortunately, with CommVault
Simpana software, we never need one as everything works just as it’s supposed
to each and every time," said Todd Russell , a lead network engineer
for Lathrop & Gage. "By going
with CommVault, we replaced three products, saved money with capacity licensing
and reduced our administrative overhead. But more than that, we now have 100%
confidence when we tell our partners their data is protected and we can restore
anything in our 30-day window. That’s a huge trust factor-and you can’t put a
number on that."

"Simpana
software will pretty much work with anything as you can virtualize a physical
machine easily and then move things around so you can build your infrastructure
the way you want. Simpana software fits like a glove, no matter how you want to
do it. Physical, virtual, it all works flawlessly," said David Alberico, a lead network engineer
for Lathrop & Gage. "Everything
we put in production, CommVault has an answer for. Not a work-around or
cobbled-together solution, but one that is seamlessly integrated and easy to
manage, which gives us peace of mind."