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Customer Success Story

Customer Success Story

ExaGrid Wins the Case for Disk-based Backup at Mintz Levin

Customer Overview

Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky, and Popeo, P.C. is a general practice, full-service Am Law 100 law firm employing approximately 550+ attorneys serving clients worldwide. They are headquartered at One Financial Center in Boston’s Financial District and have additional US offices in Los Angeles, New York City, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, as well as a strong international practice. Mintz was founded in 1933 by Haskell Cohn and Benjamin Levin. The firm’s Managing Member is Robert I. Bodian. Their collaborative attorneys work within four core practice areas – Transactional, Intellectual Property, Litigation & Investigations, and Regulatory & Advisory – and combine legal, business, and industry insight to provide exceptional legal strategies for clients in a variety of industries.

Key Benefits:

  • Full backups that took 3 days were reduced to 12-15 hours
  • Incremental nightly backups reduced from 6 hours to under an hour
  • Seamless integration with Veritas Backup Exec
  • Highly knowledgeable and proactive customer support
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Expanding Weekend Backup Window Led to Search for New Solution

Mintz prides itself in using state-of-the-art technology to manage the flow of information from research to attorney to client as quickly and efficiently as possible, providing its staff with access to the most up-to-date information 24 hours a day. Based in the firm’s Boston office, the IT staff is responsible for backing up important data such as its Exchange servers, document management system, and litigation support data. In particular, the litigation support software is a critical, yet enormous application that enables litigators to conduct research on ongoing cases. Documents are scanned into the system, and then each document is saved as a .tiff file, which is fully searchable and always available to the Mintz staff.

To protect its data, the firm was performing nightly incremental backups. Full backups were run on the weekends using nearly 50 tapes, and due to data growth, the weekend backups were often extending into the week.

“Our backup jobs began to creep further and further into the week. They would go into Monday and sometimes Tuesday. In some cases, the jobs would run into Wednesday, and that was unacceptable,” said Paul Kohan, IS manager in the systems group at Mintz Levin. “That was when we knew we needed to find another solution.”

"Our restores are now extremely fast. Before we installed ExaGrid, we had to scour tapes to find the particular file we were looking for. Some of the restore jobs would drag on for hours, if not a whole day. With ExaGrid, we’re able to get restores done in minutes. It’s a much better use of our staff resources, it reflects well on the IS Department, and it’s very reassuring to our end users. "

Paul Kohan, IS Manager, Systems Group

Superior Support and Cost-effectiveness Both Keys to Decision

After considering an upgrade to the firm’s existing tape backup system, the IT staff ultimately decided to evaluate various disk-based backup solutions. The firm selected ExaGrid due to its confidence in the sales engineering and customer support teams and the cost-effectiveness of the ExaGrid system.

“ExaGrid’s sales engineers were extremely knowledgeable and responsive in answering our questions about the system,” said Kohan. “We were also extremely comfortable with ExaGrid’s customer support team and the level of ongoing service they would offer after the system was installed. ExaGrid has been very proactive in monitoring our system and they assist us with any sort of backup-related issue we have. We didn’t get that same level of comfort from any of the other vendors. With ExaGrid, we got the feeling that they would be with us the whole time, and they have held true to that commitment.”

Kohan and his team also found ExaGrid very cost effective. “The ExaGrid system met our budget requirements, and in fact, ExaGrid came in at a lower price point than many of the other solutions we considered. Also, we didn’t have to purchase any additional software because it worked with our existing copy of Veritas Backup Exec, he said.”

Weekend Backup Window and Restore Times Dramatically Reduced with ExaGrid

After installing ExaGrid, Mintz’s backup window has been greatly reduced. The firm’s full backups were taking three days per week and have been reduced to 12-15 hours. Incremental nightly backups have been reduced from six hours to less than an hour. Restore times have also dramatically improved. Prior to moving the backups to ExaGrid, Kohan and his team would be asked to perform restores approximately once a day. “Our restores are now extremely fast. Before we installed ExaGrid, we had to scour tapes to find the particular file we were looking for. Some of the restore jobs would drag on for hours, if not a whole day. With ExaGrid, we’re able to get restores done in minutes. It’s a much better use of our staff resources. That’s reassuring to the end users and reflects well on the help desk.”

ExaGrid and Veritas Backup Exec

Veritas Backup Exec provides cost-effective, high-performance backup and recovery – including continuous data protection for Microsoft Exchange servers, Microsoft SQL servers, file servers, and workstations. High-performance agents and options provide fast, flexible, granular protection and scalable management of local and remote server backups. Organizations using Veritas Backup Exec can look to ExaGrid Tiered Backup Storage for nightly backups. ExaGrid sits behind existing backup applications, such as Veritas Backup Exec, providing faster and more reliable backups and restores. In a network running Veritas Backup Exec, using ExaGrid is as easy as pointing existing backup jobs at a NAS share on the ExaGrid system. Backup jobs are sent directly from the backup application to ExaGrid for backup to disk.

Cost Effective and Scalable Data Protection

ExaGrid’s award-winning scale-out architecture provides customers with a fixed-length backup window regardless of data growth. Its unique disk-cache Landing Zone allows for the fastest backups and retains the most recent backup in its full undeduplicated form, enabling the fastest restores.

ExaGrid’s appliance models can be mixed and matched into a single scale-out system allowing a full backup of up to 2.7PB with a combined ingest rate of 488TB/hr, in a single system. The appliances automatically join the scale-out system. Each appliance includes the appropriate amount of processor, memory, disk, and bandwidth for the data size. By adding compute with capacity, the backup window remains fixed in length as the data grows. Automatic load balancing across all repositories allows for full utilization of all appliances. Data is deduplicated into an offline repository, and additionally, data is globally deduplicated across all repositories. This combination of capabilities in a turnkey appliance makes the ExaGrid system easy to install, manage, and scale. ExaGrid’s architecture provides lifetime value and investment protection that no other architecture can match.

About ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides Tiered Backup Storage with a unique disk-cache Landing Zone that enables fastest backups and restores, a Repository Tier that offers the lowest cost for long-term retention and enables ransomware recovery, and scale-out architecture which includes full appliances with up to 6PB full backup in a single system.

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