Travers Smith Case Study
Travers Smith is one of the oldest firms in the City of London. Twice voted UK Law Firm of the Year, it is also one of the most forward thinking.
Top law firm slashes data management overheads
Overseeing backup now takes Travers Smith minutes rather than 10 days every month
IT staff liberated for more important tasks
Travers Smith is one of the oldest firms in the City of London. Twice voted UK Law Firm of the Year, it is also one of the most forward thinking.
When a more efficient way of backing up data was needed, its IT staff turned to Redstor, experts in data management since 1998.
As a global law firm, advising companies across the full range of corporate and commercial matters, Travers Smith creates an ever increasing volume of data, putting pressure on the time it was taking to back up to tape and manage the backup process.
Redstor’s cloud-based solution, now deployed on the majority of Travers Smith’s servers, automates mundane, repetitive tasks and enables backups to be completed within a tighter window.
It saves times by performing incremental backups to capture only changes that have been made, massively reducing the management overhead of the backup process and freeing up the IT department for more important tasks.
- Inability to complete backups within allocated windows
- High management overhead backing up to tape
- Redstor for virtual and physical servers to deliver high performance backups
- Quick recovery and live storage for DevOps
- Redstor for backup, replication and archiving.
- Management time reduced from 10 days to minutes per month
- Simple-to-use solution, taking the complexity out of data backup
- Reliable and robust data management
- Service levels are significantly enhanced compared to previous level
Extended backup windows were impacting on the business
What cloud feature is most critical for your success?
- Bandwidth/WAN optimisation
- Integration with on-prem storage
- Long-term archive data retention
- Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service
- Support for both public and private clouds
- Meet compliance requirements
The need for a new approach became apparent after backup times drifted late into the morning to when staff were using the system heavily, posing a risk of performance problems.
David Cassidy, Head of IT at Travers Smith, said: ''We backed up nightly to NAS devices on premise then to tape to get the data off site.''
As data grew, we needed more tapes and the backup window got too large for a 24-hour period. That was a headache.
David Cassidy, Head of IT
Redstor's software-only solution requires no additional on-prem infrastructure and can back up large data sets and complex environments seamlessly, while ensuring compliance.
And by compressing all data, Redstor minimises the demand on bandwidth by reducing the amount of data sent, stored and recovered.
Eradicating labour-intensive backups
Backup window has shrunk massively
There was also the hurdle of being able to back up incrementally for only 30 days.
David said: ''After that we had to do a base backup and the problem then was managing the space on the NAS device. It was an intensive process. Our backup window now has shrunk massively, and the majority of servers finish early in the morning.
''Ensuring the right amount of storage was difficult. We had to buy in tape loaders that take 10 tapes. When you back up across eight tapes, only one needs to go out of sequence for the whole thing to screw up. Restore time then becomes very high.''
Redstor's solution is designed to have minimal or no human intervention throughout its daily management.
Cloud backups run to an automated schedule, allowing organisations to back up data as little or as often as they like, at the click of a button. No human error, no risk.
Redstor's intelligent technology encrypts data at source, deduplicates and compresses it.
Not only does this greatly reduce the size of each file transmitted making it bandwidth efficient, but only changed data is transmitted and stored – radically reducing costs.
The primary challenge was how long it took to manage backups, sort tapes and get them into boxes to take off site. That equated to 10 days of someone's time every month.
David Cassidy, IT manager at Travers Smith
Eradicating tapes completely was also key: If you store them for 10 years, it can be an issue finding something to read them.''
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Expert support and end-to-end service
A provider that's easy to work with
Technical excellence underpins everything Travers Smith does - and having access to software experts was a big reason to choose Redstor.
David said: ''When more than 100 servers back up every night, there will always be one that does not play ball.''
Redstor's engineers are available 24/7/365 to provide expert advice to wherever and whoever in the world needs it.
We have access to the Redstor developers and get stuff resolved. A couple of guys pick up calls from us and get to the bottom of situations quickly."
David Cassidy, Head of IT at Travers Smith
Fast to deploy and easy to manage
After a stringent evaluation of three potential providers, Travers Smith were in no doubt Redstor’s easy-to-use software best met their needs.
There is no need for weeks of training or consultancy and no long, complicated process to calculate maintenance or renewal costs each year.
With intelligent, policy-driven automation, powerful monitoring and sophisticated reporting, organisations can manage by exception and easily evidence compliance.
Fast to deploy and easy to manage, Redstor's pioneering solution requires zero human intervention on a daily basis.
Travers Smith is able to provision, monitor, maintain and report on backup and recovery through a single control centre, using any device.
IT staff can create schedules, adjust retention policies and configure bandwidth usage through a centralised management console.
Redstor helps protect an entire infrastructure, regardless of whether it is physical or virtualised.
And with flexible deployment options available, it can be implemented in a matter of minutes, with backups ready to run instantly or in line with automated schedules.
David Cassidy, Head of IT at Travers Smith, said: “We are a fully VM house and the functionality to restore straight back into VMware is great.
"When firing up test systems, we restore copies of servers straight into VMware, change a bit of networking and have instant access to test networks. The guys love the ability to do that.
That integration was key - having a really easy solution to get servers back into a virtualised state with only a handful of clicks."
David Cassidy, Head of IT
How long did it take to get back up and running after your organisation's last data loss or outage?
- Less than an hour
- 1 - 4 hrs
- 5 - 12 hrs
- 13 - 24 hrs
- 25+ hrs
- Don't know
With UK data centres, Redstor meets Travers Smith's legal requirements to ensure data never leaves the country. David said: ''Making sure data is secure on our network when backups go back years was a big factor in choosing Redstor.''
With zero downtime and guaranteed data sovereignty, data remains 100% safe in Redstor's dedicated, highly secure, local data centres. Engineers are available 24/7/365 to provide expert advice.
