Documenting Change For Increased Resilience

Leading Legal Document Management Company boosts capability with NAS-based solution.

Overview

Legal Document Management (LDM) was founded in 1996 at the heart of the legal community in London to provide a dedicated reprographics service operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Since its formation, the company has expanded rapidly and now provides imaging and document management services that enable law firms, government departments and companies to meet new documentation legislation.The company is committed to being “the first choice document service specialists, offering exceptional customer service and excellent quality”. Given the highly confidential nature of the documentation and the high client expectations it is critical for LDM to have a reliable, robust and secure IT infrastructure, capable of storing vast amounts of data.Due to the rising volume of work LDM needed to refresh its storage environment and introduce a more resilient solution that would:

• Improve back up and restore times
• Increase storage space
• Improve disaster recovery
• Simplify manageability

Challenge

LDM prides itself on offering cost effective strategies to reduce the arduous task of paper-to-electronic and electronic-to-electronic document conversion.

As business expanded it required more storage to ensure it could meet customer demand.The company’s main objective was the implementation of new technology to reduce maintenance costs and ensure it could meet the growth in data. Previous backup solutions proved costly to maintain and did not offer the flexibility LDM needed.”With the existing infrastructure, the entire back up and restore strategy was intensive and difficult to manage as the business expanded,” says Johann Baasden, Network Administrator at LDM.With the original infrastructure unable to keep pace with business demands, LDM required a solution to help it perform day-to-day tasks efficiently.

It needed to be scalable enough to meet future business demand to future-proof its investment and provide a foundation for additional solutions as and when they were required. It was also critical that the solution clearly demonstrated a benefit to LDM in terms of increasing application performance and manageability to free up manpower for more value-added tasks.

Solution

Logicalis visited the company and produced a comprehensive analysis of the current infrastructure and identified improvements that could be made. By investing this time up front to understand what the company needed, Logicalis was able to produce a full evaluation of its storage needs.Working closely with the company, Logicalis implemented a Network Appliance™ (NetApp) unified storage solution, consisting of two FAS270 systems. At LDM’s London office, the NetApp system uses SnapRestore® to ensure rapid data recovery in the event of any outage and enable it to restore the most recent clean copy from the latest SnapShot™.

By implementing SnapMirror® software at the primary site, data is mirrored onto the second filer located at the remote site providing full fail over and rapid disaster recovery.The solution offers robust, cost-effective data storage with improved utilisation, higher data availability, reduced management costs, and there is room for the business to grow. Using the NetApp Data ONTAP™ operating system, it seamlessly integrates into LDM’s existing Windows environment, creating a cost-effective solution that delivers high availability, business continuity and data permanence.

Conclusion

The new IT infrastructure has given the company a faster and more manageable environment, enabling it to work more efficiently. Moving to a NetApp® solution has also reduced LDM’s administration time and given it more control over its data as an increasing amount of information is stored and backed up. It can take on more work, confident that should any storage issues arise, it has a back up and restore solution in place to deal with them.

“Overall, network performance is more than 10 times faster and we have been able to free up manpower so that we can be more flexible,” says Baasden. “The NetApp® back up solution frees me up for more valuable tasks.”The solution has also enabled LDM to improve customer service and provided clients with new options when urgent file requests are made. “On a couple of occasions clients have urgently needed case files. With SnapRestore®, the users can access the back ups themselves.

That’s a huge customer service benefit – the technology is something we emphasise when consulting with prospective clients.”The NetApp solution has solved the company’s immediate problems and given it additional flexibility for future projects. LDM continues to maintain a very strong relationship with Logicalis and together they are looking at a number of other projects.”Logicalis has proven that it can provide the solution we need to meet our exact requirements in a cost-effective and personal way. We view them very much as a partner in the whole process,” says Baasden.Logicalis Systems are exhibiting at Storage Expo the UK’s largest and most important event dedicated to data storage, now in its 5th year, the show features a comprehensive FREE education programme, and over 90 exhibitors at the National Hall, Olympia, London from 12 – 13 October 2005 http://www.storage-expo.com