Fabyanske Realizes Quick Return on Investment
Overview
The law firm of Fabyanske, Westra & Hart, P.A. provides legal services to the finance, real estate and construction industries. As a boutique firm with 65 employees, Fabyanske prides itself on providing more responsive and less expensive services than larger law firms. In addition to requiring data storage capacity to meet its day-to-day email and word processing needs, the firm stores voice files and trial-related images and documents as part of its case management process. Fabyanske selected the Compellent Storage Center because it fit the needs of a firm its size while providing the advanced functionality it required.
Situation
For each individual case, documents and images shared between litigating parties can number anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000. If a case carries on for multiple years, this number can more than double. For a small firm like Fabyanske, efficient and secure storage of case-related materials has become a critical initiative.
Fabyanske leverages an application called Summation to store and index its case materials, converting and saving documents and images as TIF files. In the past, the firm leveraged stand-alone servers, each with multiple drives, to ensure the integrity of these files. To make room for new cases, the firm purchased additional servers with new sets of drives and arrays — a time-intensive process that provided no ability to respond on demand. Basic storage expansions were expensive and usually resulted in the firm over-purchasing capacity. The process was costing the firm tens of thousands of dollars in non-essential storage expenditures.
Solution
Fabyanske was looking for a storage area network (SAN) solution that would deliver virtualization and the ability to boot from the SAN, capabilities that aren't typically available to small organizations. Michael Roller, Fabyanske's information systems manager, participated in a Compellent Customer Counsel (C3) meeting and was immediately impressed with Compellent's unique, collaborative approach to product development. With Compellent, Fabyanske has the advanced storage functionality it requires, and is experiencing return on its investment by significantly lowering costs associated with future storage growth.
Quicker Routine Recoveries
Accidental file deletions by users are the most common data hazard at Fabyanske. For example, someone overwrites a document and hasn't saved the original. With the firm's former tape-based backup system, it could take several hours to recover the document from tapes stored offsite, and if the document was created that same day, no backup of it was available. Compellent's Data Instant Replay application captures images of the data during the day and speeds data recovery by enabling the firm to roll back time and recover lost documents within minutes. Data Instant Replay has virtually eliminated the productivity loss from accidental file deletions.
Generating Return On Investment
Fabyanske used to purchase new servers for approximately $15,000 each. With Compellent, the firm has reduced server expenditures by $7,000 per server because it no longer has to purchase internal drives or array controllers with each server. According to Roller, it will not take long for Compellent's Storage Center to pay for itself in hardware costs alone. Additionally, moving data for hardware upgrades has become a five-minute activity Roller can do from home instead of a weekend project done in the office. This functionality has generated significant returns for the firm in terms of reduced administration.
Reducing the Need for Planning
Compellent has helped eliminate the complex planning associated with server purchases. The firm now can purchase new drives as it needs them and expand storage capacity on demand. Compellent's Virtualization feature allows Fabyanske to more efficiently utilize its storage resources by managing disks as a single pool. Leveraging Compellent's Dynamic Capacity, Fabyanske uses less storage by allocating space only when it is needed.