Norton Rose Group Opts for Data Domain

Data Domain, Inc. (NasdaqGM:DDUP – News), the leading provider of deduplication storage systems, today announced that Norton Rose Group has selected Data Domain to consolidate and automate its backup, restore and disaster recovery (DR) processes across 20 regional law offices, as well as in its London headquarters and UK-based production data center. The firm cites 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 important benefits which led to its purchasing decision. By using Data Domain systems, the IT department can now confidently meet local and global service level agreements (SLA) which were not attainable with its previous tape-based practices.

Norton Rose Group maintains offices across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The firm has quickly grown its business law practice, expanded its global reach through multiple office openings and increased the number of employees to more than 1,000 lawyers and about 2,200 total employees. Applications such as client practice software, finance, HR and operations are managed through the production data center, and mirrored to the DR site. However, Microsoft Exchange email 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, the firm’s IT department manages more than 200 terabytes (TB) of application data.

This growth has led to increased data demands on the IT department’s production EMC SANs and the challenges were magnified at the regional sites, which in many cases lack IT resources to administer tape backups. Malcolm Todd, Head of Systems Delivery for Norton Rose LLP, 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. DR exercises could take days to get a simulated office up and running while we waited for tapes to arrive — a totally unacceptable situation."

After evaluating differing hardware and software data reduction approaches, and extensively testing Data Domain deduplication storage, Norton Rose Group is rolling out a combination of systems, all with Data Domain Replicator software, including DD565s with ES20 expansion shelves in the production data center and DR site, and DD530s, DD510s and DD120s fanned across its regional offices — totaling 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 to all but 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 data center. Todd adds, "Our target for an international site recovery was a 4 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 4 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.

"Norton Rose Group is an excellent example of a quickly-expanding distributed enterprise that has taken control of its data protection challenges utilizing the breadth of our portfolio," said Beth White, Vice President of Marketing for Data Domain. "We’re excited to work closely with customers such as Norton Rose on large-scale storage consolidation projects that showcase the excellent ROI benefits of deduplication storage, including significant administrative and management cost savings when compared to the cumbersome and manual handling of tape."