24 November 2014
Specialist law firm Leigh Day only represents claimants, and from its offices in London and Manchester it works internationally for the rights of individuals against corporations and governments.
Quorum onQ Appliance
The company handles thousands of legal cases every year and over the past two decades these have generated a large amount of files and data. Data storage and security is critical for the firm and its clients, and in order to deal with its storage on a daily basis, Leigh Day needed to find a backup solution to support all its current and future work.
The firm’s incumbent supplier provided a ‘pay-by-capacity’ backup solution. This was leading to escalating costs as it was being charged per gigabyte. For example, saving and using high-resolution data- heavy satellite images and using the pay- by-capacity model proved unworkable
With 300 staff and new offices in Manchester, Leigh Day needed a more robust backup to accommodate its growth. It also used VMware and therefore needed a flexible infrastructure to suit this environment. Furthermore, it had to comply with regulatory bodies such as the SRA and the Data Protection Act to ensure
the safety and security of backed up data. IT reseller Covenco recommended Quorum’s onQ backup appliance. Quorum worked with Leigh Day on a proof of concept test, during which it deployed onQ to protect two servers for two months, created a test server, and implemented a real-world disaster recovery fail back.
onQ is the building block of Quorum’s disaster recovery and DRaaS capabilities, maintaining highly available, up to date VM clones of critical systems. The vendor claims the appliance is capable of efficiently taking over for failed servers within minutes, and worked “seamlessly” in Leigh Day’s virtualised environment.
The firm has now deployed three onQ appliances and an Archive Vault at its HQ in London. The devices protect 20+ servers as well as the excessive amounts of data. They take a snapshot of the local produc- tion server every 30 minutes, backing up and replicating the entire server estate.
On a monthly basis the snapshots are archived, meaning that Leigh Day will always have access to its legacy data from the Archive Vault. With its perpetual incre- mental and deduplication technologies, the amount of new data that needs to be sent to the appliances per snapshot is usually quite small, minimising not only storage requirements, but also reducing the load on Leigh Day’s LAN and WAN.
For added resiliency, Leigh Day opted to mirror the entire solution to Covenco’s data centre, where an additional three onQs and Archive Vault constantly replicate the activity in its London office to provide full disaster recovery capabilities.
The appliances keep up-to-date copies of the company’s operating system, application and data files on both the local and remote appliances. It also keeps ready-to-run ‘Recovery Nodes’ standing by. If any of Leigh Day’s servers fail, a node can be started with a single click and have the firm running again in minutes.
The entire backup process is totally automatic and doesn’t require any additional hardware or software.
