Case Study: Bingham McCutchen

As is the case with all large law firms, information is the lifeblood of Bingham McCutchen, LLP. With more than 850 attorneys and 12 offices throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan, Bingham McCutchen has data spread out over 200 servers that need to be backed up each night. The firm currently backs up over 12 terabytes of critical data each day.

Each night, full backups were performed for each server's data store. Because each server had its own tape drive, between 50 and 60 backups had to be performed at one location alone. All tapes were then taken off-site. A weekly and monthly full backup were also performed and sent off-site. The monthly backups were left off-site permanently. This procedure was performed in each of Bingham McCucthen's offices each night. At headquarters, backups consumed more than 66 tapes every night, week, and month.

The success of the firm had created backup process and media management headaches with accompanying costs. It was also recognized that e-mail had become a vital part of the firm's ability to provide service to clients. Restoring the Microsoft Exchange databases quickly in the event of failure was critical to business operations. The firm had always bought new tape drive technology when it bought new servers. This created a secondary issue of dealing with a large number of different types of tape drives and media.

Realizing that change was necessary, the IT department of the firm began the process of re-architecting its backup solutions. Led by Michael Carey, a senior security and network engineer, the department took a new approach to backup and restore. The project had two major objectives. First, IT needed to enable the backup system to restore a 100-gigabyte Exchange database in one hour, instead of the nearly one day that it had taken in the past. The second objective was to reduce the number and type of tape drives and media, simplifying nightly backups in the process.

To accomplish these goals, Bingham McCutchen brought in a series of Quantum DX30 disk-based backup systems for the large offices. The DX30 is a virtual tape system that minimized the software changes necessary to make the system compatible with the firm's existing backup software. A SAN was installed that allowed backup to be consolidated. The smaller offices replaced the multitude of tape drives with dual-drive robotic libraries. The result was better media management and fewer tapes overall. This made sense, because the amount of data was much smaller.

Primary backup is now done each day to the DX30, with the backup images cloned to tape. The tapes in turn are removed to an off-site facility as they always have been, and the normal backup schedule is maintained as usual. A week's worth of backups is kept on the disk systems to allow for rapid restore of critical systems.

The result is that Bingham McCutchen now requires only 7 to 9 tapes at its biggest office instead of 66, and restores can happen much faster. A single file restore, which used to take system administrators as much as four hours to perform, now takes six seconds. The system is faster, more scalable, and less costly to manage.