The Sovini Group
Improved performance and reliability for business users
Case Studies
Lawlords
UK Firm Modernizes IT Infrastructure and Improves Data Protection with SimpliVity
The Client
Lawlords—a leading full-service firm of costs lawyers, law costs draftsmen and costs consultants with offices in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Carlisle—replaced its outdated multivendor IT environment with SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure. The SimpliVity solution helps Lawlords ensure high performance and availability for its business-critical applications and data, while simplifying operations and reducing TCO.
The Challenge
Lawlords’ aging IT infrastructure was becoming increasingly risky and costly to maintain. The firm relied on a mix of non-redundant legacy HP and Dell servers with internal storage. Equipment failures or catastrophes had the potential to impair critical IT services and disrupt business.
Lawlords was further constrained by inefficient tape-based backup procedures. Applications and data were backed up daily, after business hours. Manual restorations from tape took hours. And any changes that occurred since the last nightly backup were simply lost.
Stuart Taylor, IT Manager for Lawlords, initiated a data center modernization program to improve the reliability and agility of the firm’s IT infrastructure. After evaluating a number of potential options including solutions from HP, NetApp and EMC, Taylor selected SimpliVity OmniCube
The Solution
SimpliVity OmniCube provides a scalable, modular, 2U building block of x86 resources that offers all the functionality of traditional IT infrastructure—in one device, with a unified administrative interface. The solution eliminates cost and complexity by assimilating a variety of IT functions including the hypervisor, compute, storage, network switching, replication, backup, WAN optimization and real-time data deduplication. The solution delivers the best of both worlds: x86 cloud economics and enterprise capabilities including data efficiency, performance, data protection and global unified management.
SimpliVity’s VM-centric administration and global unified management dramatically simplifies operations. Taylor manages the distributed 2+1 OmniCube federation from Manchester using the familiar VMware vCenter vSphere console. The SimpliVity solution also accelerates IT service agility; Taylor can clone, move or restore VMs in seconds with just two or three mouse clicks.
The Result
Lawlords implemented a geographically distributed OmniCube configuration for ultimate data protection and resiliency. The firm replaced four HP tower servers with two 2U SimpliVity OmniCube CN-2200 nodes in its primary data center in Manchester. The redundant configuration ensures continuous availability in the event of hardware failures. The firm also deployed an OmniCube CN-2200 in their Carlisle office for disaster recovery. Applications and data are backed up locally every hour and remotely every evening. Taylor has slashed the company’s RPOs and RTOs from hours to minutes or seconds. This newfound agility gives Taylor more time for other projects and to focus on improving business outcomes
After evaluating HP, NetApp and Dell we selected SimpliVity OmniCube for our nextgeneration data center because of its superior economics and all-encompassing feature set. With OmniCube’s built-in data protection capabilities we can backup and restore all our applications and data across sites in just seconds.
Case Studies
Southbank International School
World-Class School Modernises IT Infrastructure and Improves DR with SimpliVity