ARKIVIO Case Study :: Top 200 Law Firm Automates Storage Consolidation

Company Background

A, B & C is a Top 200 law firm in the US that specializes in representing corporate clients involved in the high-tech industry and focuses in areas such as corporate mergers, antitrust, and intellectual property. The firm has over 1,000 lawyers at 10 offices in the US, but has been aggressively expanding its practice through mergers and acquisitions. The firm is currently in the midst of a large acquisition with a central US law firm.

IT Environment

After the acquisition, A, B & C will have over five terabytes of direct-attached storage within its file server farm that includes 50 Windows® NT/2000 systems. In addition, the law firm has a twelve terabyte NAS appliance, which was purchased in an attempt to centralize network file storage at the firm's main corporate datacenter.

The Problem

The large server farm and direct-attached storage has resulted in excessive management costs and limited operational efficiency in terms of IT personnel, facility, and system resources. The file servers are poorly utilized and are also escalating the law firm’s datacenter costs in terms of floor space, maintenance and service costs, and software licenses. To overcome these issues, A, B & C would like to standardize on centralized and scalable NAS for their file storage. However, the migration and retirement of their legacy DAS has proven to be a difficult challenge. For instance, determining how which volumes will need to be centralized within the file server farm, how much network-attached storage capacity will be required, and how to sequence the data migration to minimize downtime to the organization becomes the biggest implementation expense.

ARKIVIO Solution

Arkivio offers a very comprehensive solution for storage consolidation from initial discovery of data and storage resources to seamless migration of end user data. First, the ARKIVIO® auto-stor software collects detailed information about total and utilized storage capacity and data usage patterns without requiring installation of server agents. The IT administrators are able to organize their files into logical groups based on file types or owners. Additionally, they are able to prioritize their data based on its value to the law firm and storage resources are classified based on characteristics such as device-type and performance. This enables the IT administrators to classify the discovery and litigation files for unsettled lawsuits as high-value, while files related to settled lawsuits are classified as low-value. Next, ARKIVIO® auto-stor automatically migrates the attorney's data from the file servers to the NAS devices at the central datacenter, according to administrator-defined policies. The migration policies ensure low-value data is matched with low-end storage and medium-value data is matched with high-end NAS devices. If the attorneys need to access the migrated files again prior to the completion of the consolidation, ARKIVIO® auto-stor automatically and immediately recalls the files to their original location and re-classifies these files as high-value. The administrators complete the consolidation process by executing the ARKIVIO® auto-stor move policies, which relocate the remaining high-value data, tag files left behind during the previous migration, and directory structure from the file servers to the appropriate NAS filers.

The Result

A & B & C gradually decommissions their legacy systems in order to minimize impact to end user productivity and application availability. The result is an automated process that ensures that new storage can be brought online without the downtime and support calls resulting from a sudden cut-over. Additionally, automated data migration and movement policies reduce the hands on activity of administrators that is both costly and error prone.