Storage Solutions: Quarles & Brady Case Study
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Transcript of 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)
“ 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
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
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.”
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© 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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