News
International Commercial Law Firm Bird & Bird Chooses ExaGrid to deliver its back-up systems
June 2010 by Marc Jacob
ExaGrid Systems, Inc. announced that Bird & Bird, the international law firm, has chosen the ExaGrid system over four other competitors including EMC-Data Domain. Exagrid won the competitive bid as Bird & Bird believed it delivered a strong combination of faster backups, a scalable long-term solution and improved security of data. Furthermore, the ExaGrid system also enabled Bird & Bird to deliver on its promises to clients by providing rapid data restores.
Bird & Bird is an international law firm with 21 offices worldwide. It focuses on multimedia, telecoms, information technology and intellectual property. It works with some of the world’s most innovative and technologically advanced companies, each of which depends on cutting-edge legal advice to meet their business objectives. As the business and client base grew, the quantity of data grew with it. Bird & Bird found that its tape-based backup systems were simply not able to cope with demand.
“I need a case file urgently.” “I’m afraid it will take 4 hours!’
The legal industry is a time critical one, with pressures on deadlines for submission to court, preparing for trial and every solicitor and paralegal billable by the hour. Therefore, any time lost through ineffective technology can have a serious impact on client service and the performance and reputation of the firm. For security reasons, the Bird & Bird back up tapes were stored at a separate location. As a result, if a file was lost, it could take up to four hours for it to be recovered – an unacceptable delay in such a time-sensitive industry.
Jon Spencer, Infrastructure Manager at Bird & Bird commented: “I selected ExaGrid’s solution ahead of the competition from a purely technological viewpoint. However, not only is it exceeding my expectations in terms of technical performance, but I have also been surprised with the business impact it has made. We now have the ability to provide any of our users with a near instant restore. This is satisfying to us in the IT team and really helps us to deliver an excellent service. Our users can be confident that the technology is behind them to deliver world class service to their clients and never waste another billable hour again.”
The load on the tape drives meant that a weekly backup was taking all weekend and most of Monday to complete. This was having significant performance implications. Spencer knew that simply adding more tape drives wouldn’t solve the problem and decided to improve the situation and cope with future demand by adding a disk-based backup system.
"We had lots of problems with tape backup which soaked up a lot of our time and resource. Our main concern was our weekly backup window because if the backup was running and the tape still in use we couldn’t restore files from that media.
“With ExaGrid we backup 8TB of data and it produces a small fraction of that amount to be stored on the back-end. I no longer come in on Monday with dread. Looking to the future, the final reason why we chose ExaGrid ahead of its competition was the scalability of its system. We now have the freedom for expansion at the later date without incurring a major financial cost," continued Spencer.
ExaGrid’s GRID computing software makes the system highly scalable, and when plugged into a switch, different sized configurations can be mixed and matched into a single GRID system with capacities of up to a 100TB full backup plus retention. When virtualized, they appear as a single system to the backup server, and load balancing of all data across servers is automatic.
60:1 deduplication rate – and restores that take minutes not hours
After a thorough selection process, Bird & Bird selected the ExaGrid system from four alternative offerings and is already beginning to see a remarkable ROI. By moving 8TB of data backups to the ExaGrid system, Bird & Bird has reduced the tape based backup window by up to 25% and will reduce it further as more data is migrated from tape to the ExaGrid system.
Andy Palmer, EMEA Sales Director for ExaGrid, commented: “To beat four other competitors and then deliver successfully upon our promise highlights ExaGrid’s momentum in the UK market. More and more customers are choosing ExaGrid as the leading disk backup solution to meet their needs, no matter the industry. The Bird & Bird example demonstrates that in addition to our proven price performance, we deliver a scalable solution that enables dynamic, growing businesses to perform at the highest level.
ExaGrid combines last backup compression along with data deduplication, which only stores changes from backup to backup instead of storing full file copies. This unique approach reduces the disk space required by a range of 10:1 to 50:1 or more, delivering unparalleled cost savings and performance. ExaGrid delivers extremely fast backup performance because data is written directly to disk, and data deduplication is performed post-process after the data is stored.
