Zero Downtime at Law Firm Rubin Lublin With Quorum DRaaS

It was a bad day for Sean Chambers, IT director of the Rubin Lublin, LLC law firm.

The firm’s HQs in Peachtree Corners, GA, was undergoing a major malfunction of its HVAC system. Sensors were misreading the building’s temperature and subsequently heating it to 115°F. Not ideal conditions for the data center’s servers and storage.

By the time Chambers and his team could respond, they had lost half the nodes of their SAN that housed their virtual servers, leaving 70% of their firm’s production servers offline.

Lucky for Rubin Lublin, Chambers had recently installed the Quorum onQ DR as a service (DRaaS) solution, which provided instant recovery integrated with backup, archive and hybrid cloud DR.

While Chambers’ server vendor worked with the firm to recover the systems, Chambers spun up and ran 19 virtual servers on Rubin Lublin’s on-premise Quorum HA appliance for four days while the issues were resolved.

“Because of Quorum, we ended up with zero downtime during business hours,” said Chambers. “Quorum provided us with the ability to hit the button for an immediate one-click recovery of our critical systems and ran them right on the appliance, taking over for our failed servers in a matter of minutes. And with 70% of our servers out, that was a big win for us.“

Rubin Lublin specializes in legal services to mortgage banking and title insurance clients in residential and commercial real-estate markets. As is common with heavily regulated industries like banking and real estate, clients have strict SLAs for storage and backup and recovery times. Those expectations include a recovery time of fewer than four hours and a recovery point of fewer than six hours.

Chambers and his team oversee an IT environment that is 80% virtualized on Windows Server and Hyper-V, running a portfolio of legal software applications.

When Chambers found the SLAs difficult to meet with his patchwork of disparate backup and recovery systems, he turned to QuorumLabs, Inc.

Since deploying onQ, Rubin Lublin has transitioned from legacy processes and products such as tape backups. Depending on the server involved, backups are conducted every two to 24 hours, taking only 15 to 45 minutes to complete. The firm is able to meet its backup and recovery SLAs.

“At the end of the day, Quorum was exactly what we needed,” Chambers said. “It was simple to use and reliable, which is important to our small IT team.“