CIN Legal Data Services Upgraded Its EMC Infrastructure

EMC Corporation announced that CIN Legal Data Services has upgraded its EMC infrastructure with EMC business continuity and VMware virtualization solutions to enable its continued rapid growth, better secure valuable data assets, and significantly lower IT infrastructure operating costs.

Lee Midkiff, Chief Executive Officer, said: "Law firms, like many businesses today, are looking for ways to increase profits through reduced costs. Because our solutions dramatically shrink the time and expense of collecting and organizing data for legal procedures, our customer base has increased from 2,500 to more than 7,000 law firms in only three and a half years. EMC has been the core backbone of our growth strategy during this period and now with this latest upgrade, we’re able to enter our next phase of expansion."

CIN Legal Data Services, provider of information and due diligence services to the consumer bankruptcy market, stores all of its business-critical applications, including Microsoft SQL Server-based data warehouses, email, Windows Server Active Directory, billing, finance and sales operations data, on its extensive EMC CLARiiON networked storage infrastructure. To design and implement the EMC and VMware solutions, CIN Legal Data Services worked with EMC Global Services and Eastern Computer Exchange, Inc., a leading distributor of enterprise storage, backup tape, security and network solutions, as well as related services.

"Risk mitigation is huge for us because our value proposition is rooted in our services being instantly available at all times," said Midkiff. "Not only would we experience significant monetary loss if we were down for an hour, we would lose credibility with clients which would create the risk of losing even greater long-term revenue from those clients. In our current environment, we now know our data is safe and we could resume operations within 20 minutes with very limited downtime. All the while, we would have the experts from EMC, Eastern and VMware here with us if something drastic happened."

To strengthen its business continuity environment, CIN Legal Data Services implemented VMware ESX Server virtualization software to consolidate 15 physical servers to six servers running 30 virtual machines that are stored on EMC CLARiiON. Additionally, the company deployed EMC RepliStor software to replicate the CLARiiON storage in the primary datacenter to a CLARiiON AX4 located 75 miles away at a new remote site; EMC Replication Manager software to create Virtual Machine and application consistent replicas of production data; and EMC Navisphere Management Suite software for simplified storage management.

With virtualization, CIN Legal Data Services avoided the purchase of 12 servers for the disaster recovery site, resulting in significant savings for the project. Additional savings were realized through the removal of certain power requirements within the back-up data center. If the firm had not virtualized or deployed remote recovery, it estimates that it would have needed 15 UPS battery back-up units instead of only four as well as two additional staff members to manage the larger, tape-based recovery environment. Combined with operational savings realized through the use of virtualization at its primary data center, the staff savings are calculated to have resulted in a 31% decrease in annual information technology expense.

"Being able to grow rapidly puts additional revenue in our pocket while allowing us to take the associated savings and invest those straight back into the business," said Midkiff. "Needing only three servers instead of 15 for our remote site also made disaster recovery a lot more economical and feasible than it would have been in a non-VMware environment."

Previously, it would take the company two days of full-time work to implement a new server that complied with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Level 1. With VMware, a new server can be perfectly configured in 24 minutes.

Ray Brown, Director of IT, CIN Legal Data Services, said: "With VMware, we can lose a server and have our virtual machines automatically move over to another server without skipping a beat. For all that to happen and not even know about it is a huge time savings and reliability boost."