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Provider of Legal Documents Does It Faster, Better, Smarter with Brocade
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Applied Discovery, a leading provider of electronic legal discovery services, was facing resource limitations within their data centers due to skyrocketing data volumes. The company's storage demands were escalating along with its business, and it was running up against space and power limitations at its hosted facility. The facility could only provide 150 watts of power per square foot, or approximately 3000 watts per rack. Because of the large size and power consumption of its legacy SAN directors, Applied Discovery was unable to conserve space by mounting two devices in a single rack. The systems also presented port density issues. Their expansion blades shared a common backplane, which meant that hundreds of storage devices could compromise the systems’ performance. Moreover, reliability issues often required administrators’ attention and potentially threatened to impact the SLAs.
About The Customer
Applied Discovery is a leading provider of electronic legal discovery services to top U.S. corporations and law firms, and a business unit of LexisNexis. The Bellevue, Washington-based company’s 300 employees digitize documents from parties involved in legal proceedings and make them available for review in searchable databases during the discovery phase of litigation. The company maintains strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure that clients, including many Fortune 500 corporations and AmLaw 100 law firms, have uninterrupted access to their files. Applied Discovery built a Storage Area Network (SAN) at its local data center to securely house terabytes of sensitive client data and records. As the business grew and its storage needs increased, the company identified a possible solution with a large data center in another region.
The Solution
To resolve its data center dilemma, Applied Discovery found that Brocade 48000 Directors offered the right mix of design, features, and performance. Able to deliver 4 and 8 Gbit/sec speeds at up to 384 ports, the enterprise-class platforms provide the superior port density and performance that Applied Discovery required. Because of their compact form factor and much lower energy consumption, the company can place two devices in a single rack, maximizing space and power. In August 2007, Applied Discovery installed two Brocade 48000 Directors at its hosted data center, and it plans to install additional platforms at its other local and remote sites to replace legacy devices. To consolidate its data at the hosted facility, Applied Discovery relied on Brocade Professional Services to concurrently deploy two Brocade 7500 Extension Switches at that site and one each at the other locations to provide high-speed FCIP connectivity.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
