DFA Law Saves Time and Money

Smartways helps Traditional Law Firm to Modernise and Lead the Way by Providing Services to Ensure Business Continuity.

Just two weeks ago, web-site and e-book business Art of Performance experienced complete data loss when a local power cut occurred at the moment the server was shutting down for the night, which caused the desktop PC to break down. The system administrator initially contacted the computer manufacturer who gave an estimate of one week for a new system to be uploaded, but could offer no remedy in view of the lost data. However, with the Asigra-based backup software already in place as part of the overall IT support service from Falcon IT, Art of Performance had a new PC installed and was able to access all of its lost data within eight hours of the power cut.

The combination of agentless software and disk-based backup across a WAN attacks both the "hard" and "soft" costs associated with conventional tape backup, including software license fees, media and drive maintenance, offsite storage, and the staffing required to perform tape-based backup. At the DFA Law office, a TouchPoint Local Server (TPLS) - a dedicated backup appliance - runs the DS-Client that discovers all servers connected to the local network and automates the backup of all local data assets on a scheduled daily basis. DFA Law also uses the Constant Data Protection (CDP) element of TouchPoint to constantly protect their Microsoft Exchange 2003 server. Before the backup data set is transmitted to Smartways’ data centre, the software analyses the data, finds new and changed file blocks, eliminates duplicate files and further compresses the residue bytes to ensure the backup set is as compact as possible.

The software then encrypts the data before sending it over an ADSL connection to the Smartways datacentre, where the TouchPoint N+1 servers are located. The data remains encrypted at-rest in the datacentre. Mike Rickards, MD of Smartways, stated: “We have been able to save on costs for DFA Law through the agentless architecture of the Asigra backup software, so that DFA Law only pays for the aggregate amount of compressed data across the network and there are no software license fees or hardware costs. This backup structure means that we can offer customers a flat monthly fee, which they prefer because there are no nasty surprises at the end of the month and it also saves us time in the billing process.” Furthermore, Smartways provides DFA Law with Asigra’s bare metal restore (BMR) feature, so that in the face of a systems breakdown, the tool allows administrators to quickly recover lost, damaged or corrupted data in a highly streamlined fashion to any bare metal system – regardless of manufacturer – without having to manually reinstall the same operating system or to configure hardware prior to use.

Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, said: “As well as the flexible billing structure, our backup configuration also makes the retrieval of data a simple task. There is no point in backing up data if you’re uncertain as to whether you can restore all of the data within a target time period. For a time-sensitive firm like DFA Law, if an individual machine goes down, the recent lost data can be restored locally very quickly from the TPLS and this process can be tested by DFA Law simply by restoring data from the TPLS to another drive on a PC. If the whole system goes down, Smartways can restore the data from its datacentre and carry out a bare metal restore on new machines, allowing DFA Law to access its lost data as quickly as possible.” Due to the de-duplication of the files in the backups, all DFA Law solicitors can have backups carried out as often as they wish for free, even continuous data protection (CDP) if they require it. Many solicitors cannot afford to lose even one day’s work, so this capability is very attractive to DFA Law. The de-duplication feature means that unchanged files that are still on the system are only transmitted and stored once. They are not repeatedly transmitted and stored with each backup set.