Storage Solutions: Quarles & Brady Case Study

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Quarles & Brady survives a hurricane and performs discovery processes 1.8-fold faster with Dell storage solution •  Backup/Recovery/Archiving •  Blade Solutions •  Database—SQL Server  •  Dell Systems Management •  Storage/Storage Consolidation •  Virtualization—Client  •  Virtualization—Server “We wanted easy- to-manage storage that would give us the ability to set up a disaster recovery scenario. Dell EqualLogic was the only solution that offered both, with replication features built-in at no additional cost.” Rich Raether, Manager, Network Engineering, Quarles & Brady Customer Profile Company: Quarles & Brady LLP Industry: Law Country: United States Employees: 1,000 Web: www.quarles.com Business Need  Quarles & Brady was overhauling its IT infrastructure and building a new data center and needed to support server virtualization in its two data centers and several remote locations. The firm also needed to implement a disaster recovery solution that would simplify management, especially for its Naples, Florida office where hurricanes can occur. Solution  The law firm has virtualized 75 percent of its servers using VMware and Dell PowerEdge servers with Intel ® Xeon ® processors along with 46 Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SANs and Riverbed ® Steelhead ® WAN optimization appliances. Taking advantage of a full range of technological capabilities that Dell EqualLogic includes with its products, Quarles & Brady has greatly accelerated processing while simplifying storage and disaster recovery. Benefits •  No downtime for attorneys in the Naples,  Florida office during Hurricane Fay •  45-minute failover in disaster recovery scenario •  1.8-fold acceleration of discovery process  with Dell EqualLogic SSDs  •  93% improvement in local recovery point  objective (24 hours vs. two weeks) •  12-fold faster recovery of lost files   (5 minutes vs. 1 hour) •  10-fold improvement in time to provision  virtual desktop (40 seconds vs. 7 minutes) •  Able to mitigate virtual desktop boot storms  by aging sessions from SSD to SAS disk •  10-fold faster replication with Riverbed  Steelhead appliances •  1.75-fold faster rebuilding of full-text indexes •  2-fold improvement in performance for   index searches •  24-fold faster performance of storage tasks  such as adding volumes (5 minutes vs. 2 hours) •  Virtual guest operating systems in   10GbE environment boot twice as fast   (12-14 seconds vs. 28-30)

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Quarles & Brady survives a hurricane and performs discovery processes 1.8-fold faster with Dell storage solution.

Transcript of Storage Solutions: Quarles & Brady Case Study

Page 1: Storage Solutions: Quarles & Brady Case Study

Quarles & Brady survives a hurricane and performs discovery processes 1.8-fold faster with Dell storage solution

•  Backup/Recovery/Archiving•  Blade Solutions•  Database—SQL Server •  Dell Systems Management•  Storage/Storage Consolidation•  Virtualization—Client •  Virtualization—Server

“ We wanted easy- to-manage storage that would give us the ability to set up a disaster recovery scenario. Dell EqualLogic was the only solution that offered both, with replication features built-in at no additional cost.” Rich Raether, Manager, Network Engineering, Quarles & Brady

Customer Profile

Company: Quarles & Brady LLP

Industry: Law

Country: United States

Employees: 1,000

Web: www.quarles.com

Business Need Quarles & Brady was overhauling its IT infrastructure and building a new data center and needed to support server virtualization in its two data centers and several remote locations. The firm also needed to implement a disaster recovery solution that would simplify management, especially for its Naples, Florida office where hurricanes can occur.

Solution The law firm has virtualized 75 percent of its servers using VMware and Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers with Intel® Xeon® processors along with 46 Dell EqualLogic™ iSCSI SANs and Riverbed® Steelhead® WAN optimization appliances. Taking advantage of a full range of technological capabilities that Dell EqualLogic includes with its products, Quarles & Brady has greatly accelerated processing while simplifying storage and disaster recovery.

  Benefits•  No downtime for attorneys in the Naples, 

Florida office during Hurricane Fay

•  45-minute failover in disaster recovery scenario

•  1.8-fold acceleration of discovery process with Dell EqualLogic SSDs 

•  93% improvement in local recovery point objective (24 hours vs. two weeks)

•  12-fold faster recovery of lost files  (5 minutes vs. 1 hour)

•  10-fold improvement in time to provision virtual desktop (40 seconds vs. 7 minutes)

•  Able to mitigate virtual desktop boot storms by aging sessions from SSD to SAS disk

•  10-fold faster replication with Riverbed Steelhead appliances

•  1.75-fold faster rebuilding of full-text indexes

•  2-fold improvement in performance for  index searches

•  24-fold faster performance of storage tasks such as adding volumes (5 minutes vs. 2 hours)

•  Virtual guest operating systems in  10GbE environment boot twice as fast  (12-14 seconds vs. 28-30)

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“ With the Riverbed Steelhead appliances in place, replication takes just one hour. This enables us to hit our backup windows for business continuity and DR.” Rich Raether, Manager, Network Engineering, Quarles & Brady

At the law firm Quarles & Brady LLP,

Rich Raether had recently taken over as

manager of network engineering. Based

in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Quarles & Brady

began as a local firm 118 years ago and

has grown to earn a place among the

Am Law 200, with approximately 450

attorneys and offices in Chicago, Illinois,

Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin,

Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, Shanghai,

China—and Tampa and Naples, Florida.

When Wilma struck Florida, the office in

Tampa wasn’t open yet, but the Naples

office needed to prepare for the storm.

The office had direct-attached storage,

common for Quarles & Brady’s remote

offices. The storage backed up to tape

which was stored in safety-deposit boxes.

The disaster recovery plan was sending

the last night’s tapes by overnight express

to Milwaukee headquarters.

Shut down by a hurricane

The Naples office was closed for four days.

Attorneys went to hotel rooms in Atlanta

or went to Milwaukee to work, but their

data was inaccessible during that time,

which hampered their work.

That made an impression on Raether,

who had arrived at Quarles & Brady as the

firm was refreshing its IT infrastructure

with new servers, networking equipment

and storage. In the process of rebuilding,

Raether was looking for new hardware

solutions for the company’s remote

offices that would enable the firm to avoid

a repeat of the Hurricane Wilma incident.

Most of Raether’s staff of 15 worked in

the firm’s main data centers in Milwaukee

and Phoenix. The smaller offices use

local office IT support contractors, not

engineers. “If we had a problem, we

had to get on the phone with them and

talk them through the process,” says

Raether. “We were virtualizing some of the

servers in these locations with VMware

to simplify management, and we were

looking at getting new storage to replace

the direct-attached storage and provide

some disaster recovery capability. As it

turned out, what really drove that was the

Naples office and Hurricane Wilma. We

didn’t want to be putting tapes in safety-

deposit boxes and overnighting the tapes

to Milwaukee in the face of a hurricane.

We wanted to make the data safe so that

attorneys could continue to work from

wherever they were.”

Simplified storage with  built-in replication

The team looked at Fibre Channel storage

options and decided that a traditional

frame-based SAN would add management

requirements, not simplify them. They then

evaluated virtualized iSCSI SAN solutions

from LeftHand Networks, NetApp and Dell

EqualLogic. “We wanted easy-to-manage

storage that would give us the ability to

set up a disaster recovery scenario,” says

Raether. “Dell EqualLogic was the only

solution that offered both, with replication

features built-in at no additional cost.”

On Monday, October 24, 2005, Hurricane Wilma made landfall in Florida. It was the most intense hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic basin, and the fourth most costly storm in U.S. history. Damage in Florida alone totaled more than $26 billion. In some areas, power was out for two weeks.

Technology at Work

Hardware

Dell™ EqualLogic™ PS6010XVS, PS6000XVS, PS6000S, PS5000, PS100 iSCSI SANs

Dell PowerEdge™ M610 blade servers with Intel® Xeon® processors 5600 series

Dell PowerEdge M1000e modular blade enclosure

Dell PowerEdge R710 servers with Intel Xeon processors 5500 series

Fusion-io ioDrive Duo memory card

Riverbed Steelhead appliances

Software

Citrix XenDesktop

Dell EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters (SAN HQ)

Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 database

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS®)

VMware® vSphere™ 4.1

Windows Server® 2008 R2, 2008, 2003

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Quarles & Brady chose to equip its remote

offices with Dell EqualLogic PS100 storage

arrays to provide a flexible, easy-to-

operate shared storage environment for

VMware. The firm was so pleased with the

performance that it brought EqualLogic

into its main data centers as a replacement

for legacy storage. “Currently, we’re well

over 75 percent virtualized,” says Raether.

“EqualLogic works so well in our VMware

environment that we started to use it for

other workloads. Today email is the most

important application that our attorneys

use, and our Microsoft Exchange Server

2007 implementation is virtualized across

the board, and all the data is stored on a

Dell EqualLogic PS6000XV SAN.”

Intelligent management of  virtual desktop workloads

The firm is using Dell EqualLogic

PS6010XVS SANs for its virtual desktop

initiative with Citrix XenDesktop, currently

underway, which will provide attorneys

with the ability to log onto their Windows-

based workstations remotely. The

PS6010XVS is a 10 Gigabit Ethernet hybrid

array with both solid-state drives (SSD) and

serial-attached SCSI (SAS) drives in a single

enclosure, with the ability to automatically

load balance between the two storage

tiers. “We’ve reduced the time it takes to

provision a virtual desktop from 7 minutes

to around 40 seconds with the Dell

EqualLogic PS6010XVS,” Raether notes.

Unlike most other workloads, virtual

desktop workloads are highly variable

in terms of input/output operations per

second (IOPS) requirements. Typically

there are periods of very high IOPS when

many users are accessing the storage,

followed by periods of lower usage. For

example, every morning when a large

number of users are logging in to their

desktops—called a “storm”—there is

a very high demand for IOPS on the

storage infrastructure that supports the

virtual desktops. While it is possible to

design the storage to support these peak

performance needs by overprovisioning,

that creates cost-inefficiencies.

Dell EqualLogic hybrid arrays are designed

to handle such a variable workload without

having to overprovision. The PS6010XVS

arrays automatically move hot data to

SSD drives, which are capable of handling

much higher IOPS than SAS or SATA

drives. After the login and boot storms are

over, the PS6010XVS arrays migrate the

workload to SAS drives automatically.

“We’re seeing amazing performance

results for virtual desktops with the hybrid

EqualLogic arrays,” says Raether. “The

heavy disk workloads hit the SSD drives

automatically and remain there as long as

necessary to ensure optimal performance.

Provisioning disks, boot times and overall

end user environment responsiveness

have improved greatly.”

1.8-fold faster discovery process

Quarles & Brady virtualized most of its

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 database

environments using Dell EqualLogic

PS6000XV SANs with 15K SAS drives.

“We also have a couple of Dell EqualLogic

PS6000S arrays with SSDs in two different

storage pools,” says Raether. “We keep

the databases themselves on SAS drives

and the logs and temp databases on

SSDs. The SSDs give us 1.8 times the

performance—almost double.”

The performance boost enables the

firm to perform processes such as

discovery in almost half the time it

took in the previous Fibre Channel

SAN environment, saving clients billable

time and improving productivity.

10-fold faster replication time

To optimize WAN traffic and provide

fast access to documents without

maintaining a local document

management infrastructure at each site,

Quarles & Brady uses Riverbed Steelhead

appliances at all its offices. Because the

appliances deduplicate data and increase

the efficiency of the TCP connection, data

can traverse the WAN much faster, making

the WAN feel very much like a LAN.

Powered by the Riverbed Optimization

System (RiOS), the Steelhead appliances

enhance the benefits of EqualLogic

replication by decreasing replication

time 10-fold. “Replicating a volume

from Chicago to Milwaukee without

the Steelhead appliances might take 10

hours,” says Raether. “With the Riverbed

Steelhead appliances in place, replication

takes just one hour. This enables us to

hit our backup windows for business

continuity and DR, because as we’re

replicating larger and larger volumes

across the wire, at some point those

replication jobs would be running into

the morning hours without the Steelhead

appliances. We’ve also reduced our

courier bills with the ability to quickly

send large files across the WAN.”

“ The data center was built to last 10 years, but I anticipate that it will last us 15 years with the Dell EqualLogic storage and the Dell PowerEdge servers, extending the value of our investment by 33 percent. It’s rare that IT equipment can have an impact like that.” Rich Raether, Manager, Network Engineering, Quarles & Brady

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Failover in 45 minutes as  hurricane approached

Quarles & Brady now has a total of 46

Dell EqualLogic arrays—347 terabytes

in total—working to save time and

money and protect data during disasters.

The definitive test for the replication

capabilities of the EqualLogic equipment

occurred three years after Hurricane

Wilma, when Hurricane Fay made landfall

near Naples, Florida on August 19, 2008.

“We did a final replication push from the

Naples office to Milwaukee, which took

about 45 minutes,” says Raether. “We

shut down all of the services in the Naples

office, then brought up those servers on

the replicated volumes from VMware and

the associated volumes in the Milwaukee

data center. We did a failback to Naples

two days later, which took one and a

quarter hours and brought services back

up in the Naples office. Attorneys went

to Atlanta or to Milwaukee, but they were

able to work throughout that period, and

never had to worry about where their data

was coming from.”

Doubling performance for  full-text index searches

The firm’s document management system

has a full-text indexing application, IDOL,

that does not certify iSCSI-attached

storage. The system has 14 million records,

and to rebuild an index took three and a

half days using locally attached storage.

The team turned to Dell for a Fusion-io

ioDrive memory card, which uses the

PCI bus internal to the server to provide

a storage layer that is faster than SSD but

not as fast as RAM. The Fusion-io card cut

down the time needed to rebuild indexes

to two days, a 1.75-fold improvement. “We

were able to get the same performance

boost that we got with the EqualLogic SSD,”

says Raether. “Searches that attorneys

perform are returning results in 15 seconds

rather than 30 seconds previously.”

Saving 55 minutes a day for  higher-value tasks

With Dell EqualLogic storage, the recovery

point objective (RPO) for the local offices

has been reduced from two weeks to 24

hours since snapshots are taken once a

day, a 93 percent improvement. The time

needed to recover a file has been reduced

from one hour to five minutes. The team

receives at least one such request per day,

so that savings alone reclaims 55 minutes

per day for other higher value tasks.

Expanding volumes or fulfilling new

storage requests used to take one-to-two

hours on the previous Fibre Channel SANs,

and only one engineer had the expertise

to do it. “And if we had a new server to

set up and we had to go into the fiber

director switches and set up the proper

channeling, it took one to two hours,” says

Raether. “I have six people on my staff that

can go into an EqualLogic unit, set up a

volume, set up an iSCSI software initiator

on the server end, connect it up and start

dishing up a volume within five minutes,

which is 24-fold faster than before.”

In addition, the Dell EqualLogic SANs

eliminated approximately 90 percent

of the tape used in Quarles & Brady’s

data protection strategy, savings

thousands of dollars a year.

Adding to productivity even more is Dell

EqualLogic SAN HeadQuarters (SAN HQ),

the reporting and monitoring software

tool that provides a single-screen view

of all EqualLogic assets. “SAN HQ is a

wonderful tool,” says Raether. “It is up

on my desktop all day long. And it didn’t

cost me anything. I can easily see which

storage workloads are hitting the SSD

and which have been migrated to other

tiers.” SAN HQ uses Simple Network

Management Protocol (SNMP) to collect

performance, alarm and health status

data from multiple EqualLogic storage

array groups that can be spread across

locations around the world.

Improving VDI performance 10-fold

During its infrastructure overhaul, Quarles

& Brady purchased 120 Dell PowerEdge

servers for its environment. Today most of

the servers used for virtualization are Dell

PowerEdge R710 servers with Intel Xeon

processors 5500 series. The servers run

Windows Server 2008 (both R1 and R2) and

Windows Server 2003, with some legacy

applications on Windows XP or 2000.

For its virtual desktop infrastructure, the

team is using a Dell PowerEdge M1000e

modular blade enclosure with Dell

PowerEdge M610 blade servers with

Intel Xeon processors 5600 series in a

10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) environment.

“We chose to deploy Dell blades for VDI

because it gives us the ability to contain

most of the network traffic within the

same switch fabric,” says Raether. “The

new six-core Intel Xeon 5600 series

processors have removed the CPU

bottlenecks from our VDI hosts, providing

one-third more processing power.”

The impact of 10GbE has been significant.

“Once we made sure all the network

settings were optimized, the results have

been fantastic,” says Raether. “Virtual guest

operating systems boot twice as fast, in

12-14 seconds instead of 28-30. Using

multipath I/O (MPIO) on the EqualLogic

hybrid arrays, we are seeing iSCSI speeds

of 1,100 MB/s reads and 800 MB/s writes in

the virtualization layer with VLAN tagging

in use. That’s 10 times faster than the 1 GbE

environment without MPIO.”

33% extra value from new data center

Quarles & Brady built a new 2,000 square

foot data center to house the new Dell

infrastructure. “The new data center is

at half capacity now,” says Raether. “The

data center was built to last 10 years, but

I anticipate that it will last us 15 years with

the Dell EqualLogic storage and the Dell

PowerEdge servers, extending the value of

our investment by 33 percent. It’s rare that

IT equipment can have an impact like that.”

Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit: dell.com/servicedescriptions

© July 2011. Intel and Intel Xeon are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States or other countries. Microsoft, SQL Server and Windows Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. This case study is for informational purposes only. DELL MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS CASE STUDY. Reference number: 10008898

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Page 5: Storage Solutions: Quarles & Brady Case Study

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