In Law Industry, D4 Chose Dell

Dell, Inc. continues to accelerate the growth of midsize businesses, providing scalable technology solutions that help firms focus on business needs without worrying about the reliability of their IT environment.

According to the company, growing firms that are more progressive to invest in technology are poised to see better business performance. SMB Group’s 2012 SMB Routes to Market Study found a strong correlation between increased technology investments and business performance. The survey revealed that 60% of the SMBs plan to invest more in technology in 2013, 85% of these SMBs expected revenue growth.

D4, LLC provides corporations and law firms with litigation support through eDiscovery and computer forensic services, helping to reduce the number of documents attorneys review, saving their clients money. The firm, which is headquartered in Rochester, NY, experienced growth, its data was doubling every 18 months and the company needed an enterprise storage solution that could scale.

"We’re dealing with an explosion in the amount of data that needs to be assessed in litigation," says John Holland, CEO and founder of D4. "Of every dollar spent in litigation, 70 to 80% is spent on document review. The D4 value proposition is to reduce documents early. We get everything stored in a manner where we can search it, analyze it, and use automated tools and technology to winnow it down to the most responsive data set, so the cost of attorney review is minimized."

To address customer needs D4 chose Dell Compellent Storage Center array for its automated tiering, replays and cost-efficient scalability that would enable the company’s growth. D4 was able to boost speed while enabling zero storage downtime. The firm’s new ability to sift through data effectively has helped save the company $250,000 and increase revenue by 30 to 40% a year to become a national player in eDiscovery services.

Supported by its Compellent Storage Center, D4 has launched eNtrust, a managed service providing the in-house eDiscovery capability clients want without the hassle and expense of having to build, maintain and support their own systems.

"Instead of just sending us data, our clients could send us virtual servers and we could give them DR capabilities," says Mike Boyle, system administrator at D4. "Compellent gives us the ability to keep servers and data from different clients on our SAN and separate them logically and physically for security. We’re in a position to say to our clients ‘we are your cloud.’"

The Law Offices of Aaron I. Katsman, P.C. is a law firm specializing in real estate transactions. The firm is expanding, and its legacy server hardware was struggling to keep up with sudden growth in both clientele and staff.

"Our servers were frequently crashing," said Aaron Katsman, owner of The Law Offices of Aaron I. Katsman, P.C. "We had to reboot them every other day. We usually would reboot after business hours, but it was still disruptive-and if we forgot to reboot, our programs wouldn’t work well the next morning. The technical issues became more than an annoyance. They were an obstacle to getting our work done."

To maintain excellence in customer service, the firm needed an IT infrastructure that would allow them to scale with growth and reduce downtime. Katsman Law turned to Dell partner, WorkITsafe.com, Inc., to virtualize its servers and desktops using Windows Server 2012 running on a 12G Dell PowerEdge server and a Dell PowerVault storage array. With these solutions in place, the firm was able to spend 90% less time setting up a new user’s desktop. Additionally, the stable systems improved employee productivity and customer service, with 99.99% availability of virtual server and VDI.

"We’re able to limit downtime, and all our employees can work with less frustration because of the Dell-based infrastructure. Not only do we have happier employees, we have happier clients as well," said Katsman.