Troutman Sanders Case Study

“After we finished implementing the Data Domain systems, I remember coming in on Monday morning and, for the first time in five years, all of our backups were completed.”

John Thomas
IT Manager
Troutman Sanders, LLP

• Troutman Sanders Case Study (PDF)

Troutman Sanders LLP, founded in 1897, is an Atlanta-based international law firm with over 600 attorneys serving clients from offices in Atlanta, Hong Kong, London, New York, Norfolk, Raleigh, Richmond, Tysons Corner, Virginia Beach and Washington, D.C. The full-service firm offers a broad array of over 30 practice areas including corporate, finance, real estate, litigation and public law.

Customer Challenges

While data availability is critical for virtually all companies, the legal industry presents its IT managers with unique challenges. John Thomas, IT Manager for Troutman Sanders, notes that the legal environment “…is unlike any other I’ve worked in. Very demanding. One hundred percent uptime is expected for all systems. If a document for a case is overwritten, the attorneys need to have it back immediately.”

In the legal field, a client’s case could be compromised or large dollars could be lost from the unavailability of even a single document of an active case.

Troutman Sanders’ tape backup equipment had cycled through to its end of life and it was time to look for a new solution. But the shortcomings of a tape-based backup system had been brewing for some time and the demands of the legal environment just exacerbated the need for change: “We had been dealing with tape…” says Thomas. “…exposing ourselves to the risk of having tapes lost by shipping companies, experiencing tape failures and facing all the security risks inherent to tape. The firm and its data were both growing and ‘more of the same’ just didn’t seem like a viable strategy for our backups going forward.”

With multiple sites conducting their own local backups, the scenario extended to their disaster recovery efforts. Backup windows were elongating as capacity grew and restores at remote sites were becoming difficult, often requiring travel to troubleshoot systems to complete recoveries.

Data Domain Solution

While Troutman Sanders evaluated a variety of non-tape solutions, Thomas found that, “Other solutions we looked at were software, then you had to combine that with hardware and related media — and pretty soon the price got out of control. So beyond all the benefits and efficiencies, the ‘bang for the buck’ with Data Domain was a big part of the sell for us.”

Troutman Sanders initially piloted Data Domain restorers at its Hong Kong and D.C. offices, WAN vaulting backup data from the 2 sites back to its headquarters in Atlanta via existing T1 lines using Data Domain’s DD Replicator Software. With the success of the intercontinental pilot, they moved forward with implementing a 12 site local backup and remote disaster recovery plan, using a many-to-one configuration to replicate remote office backup sets to Atlanta, which in turn replicated all backups to its Richmond office. Both Atlanta and Richmond used Data Domain DD460 systems. A combination of DD430 and DD410 systems were used for the balance of remote offices.

Today, all data at all offices is available both locally for restores and also remotely at the Atlanta and Richmond facilities. Most of Troutman’s existing network infrastructure was able to be used for WAN vaulting data sets due to the capacity optimization (massive data reduction) technology applied by the Data Domain restorers. Management of all backups is now centralized and automated with disk-to-disk backups. Currently, once a week, tape is used at the Richmond or Atlanta locations for archiving. Tape technology has been completely eliminated at all other offices. “After we finished implementing the Data Domain Restorers, I remember coming in on Monday morning and, for thefirst time in five years, all of our backups were completed,” says Thomas.

Business Benefits

With Data Domain restorers and DD Replicator software, Troutman Sanders has eliminated both the operational and financial inefficiencies of their previous tape-based backup processes.

Troutman’s sites currently backup approximately 50 TB of data. Management of the geographically dispersed backup processes is now fully automated and centrally controlled, significantly reducing administration costs and eliminating travel costs for remote site system troubleshooting. Tape media purchases and store/retrieve shipping and handling charges for the 12 offices have also been eliminated. Backup windows have been reduced significantly as well. At one mid-sized site, for example, Thomas notes that the backup time for 100 Gb of Exchange data was reduced from over 11 hours to just 55 minutes. Average compression ratios for the installed sites is approximately 25x, with some site seeing in excess of 50x compression.

Perhaps most important of all, restores are now reliable and fast. Data Domain’s Data Integrity Architecture verifies availability of data upon completion of the backup. “The nice thing about backing up to disk is that restores are nearly instantaneous,” says Thomas. “It actually takes us longer to drill down through the backup software to locate a file than the time to restore it.”