Krieg DeVault Makes the Case for a Compellent SAN
Krieg DeVault, a 130-year-old prominent commercial law firm in Indianapolis, is on the path to becoming a "paper-lite" organization by storing thousands of case files, financial statements and other data electronically. With worldwide clients in 15 practice areas, including healthcare, government, intellectual property and banking industries, the firm has a high volume of client documents that must be securely stored and rapidly recovered.
A previous storage area network (SAN) was inefficient, costly to manage and forced administrators to guess storage needs upfront. This resulted in wasted and underallocated capacity and painful expansion procedures.
"Expanding capacity after the fact or trying to recapture unused capacity that had already been allocated was a time consuming and sometimes impossible project for our team," explains George Smith, chief technical officer for Krieg DeVault.
Krieg DeVault administrators also spent hours managing daily tape backups for local file recovery and business continuity. Recovering accidentally deleted data required a minimum of 24 hours notice to retrieve backup tapes from a remote site. For Krieg DeVault lawyers working on a deadline, this recovery time was not acceptable.
Smith selected the Compellent SAN to dramatically reduce the time required to backup and recover its information, simplify overall management, maximize utilization and ensure efficient disaster recovery at a fraction of the cost of traditional offerings.
Continuous Snapshots and Remote Replication Cut Time to Recovery
In the Krieg DeVault offices, nearly all case data is stored electronically. This data is critical to the firm's continued success; in fact, Krieg DeVault's lawyers list data security and quick data restoration as top priorities. With Compellent's Data Instant Replay, Krieg DeVault can take snapshots, called Replays, which require minimal space, don't impact performance and allow administrators to restore files in less than 10 minutes.
"Using the Compellent interface, we were able to easily create and apply overlapping Replay schedules to ensure enhanced data protection," explains Smith. "We take Replays every two hours that expire after 12 hours and daily Replays that expire after 14 days." Krieg DeVault still does weekly full backups, but time consuming daily backups are a thing of the past.
With Compellent's Thin Replication, Krieg DeVault can transfer Replays over low-cost Ethernet connections to a remote SAN configured with cost-effective mid-tier drives, saving 50 percent over traditional replication offerings. Krieg DeVault administrators use the bandwidth shaping feature to set line speed and replication priority during the day.
Advanced Virtualization and Thin Provisioning Increase Utilization
Krieg DeVault's IT staff sizes volumes based on applications. Its previous SAN solution required capacity to be allocated at the time the volumes were created.
"We had to guess in the beginning, which wasn't always an accurate way to size the volumes," says Smith. "If we allocated 100 GB but after five months the volume size reached 95 GB, it wasn’t easy to expand. With Compellent, we can allocate dynamically and add capacity on the fly."
Compellent's virtualization technology manages all disk space as a centralized pool so administrators at Krieg DeVault can easily create and expand volumes online without disruption or downtime. Compellent's Thin Provisioning software only consumes physical disk space when data is written by the application; therefore, Krieg DeVault no longer allocates capacity upfront. Not only does this save administrators time and maximize capacity utilization, it reduces overall disk expenditures because the firm no longer needs to purchase capacity that may not be used.
Additionally, Compellent's modular architecture allows Krieg DeVault to grow as business needs change, easily implementing new technology as it becomes available. Recently, when larger capacity drives came on the market, Krieg DeVault was able to seamlessly upgrade from 300 GB drives to 750 GB drives to increase capacity at the remote site.
'It was as easy as pulling out the old disks and putting in the new ones," explains Smith. "We were able to vastly increase capacity and the only cost was the cost of the drives."
Automated Tiered Storage Cuts Costs
Legal data has a unique lifecycle, with case files being accessed over the course of several years. Storing all data, even data that is rarely accessed, on high-performance disks can be an expensive solution. On the other hand, manually managing the lifecycle of legal data by classifying and migrating files to the appropriate tier is an on-going and time consuming process for any IT department.
With Compellent's Data Progression, Krieg DeVault's data is automatically classified and migrated to the appropriate tier of storage. Active case files are automatically stored on high-performance disks, ensuring fast access. Inactive files are stored on lowercost drives which frees up space on high performance disks. Describing the benefit of Data Progression, George Smith states, "This tiered storage environment has cut the cost of managing our data in half."