Hooper Lundy & Bookman Chooses Exablox’s Scale-Out Storage

Exablox Corp. announced that Hooper Lundy & Bookman, P.C. (HLB), a large full-service law firm in the country dedicated to the representation of health-care providers and suppliers, chose OneBlox over EMC Corp.’s Data Domain, ExaGrid Systems, Inc. and Quantum Corp. as its storage solution.

HLB needed a scalable architecture to support its litigation imaging, Veeam Backup and DR requirements. The law firm selected Exablox for its scale-out architecture, inline deduplication and reliability, as well as for its BYOD strategy. BYOD offers users the flexibility to purchase the capacity they need when they need it and the ability to mix and match commodity HDDs. These features, combined with the ease of management via OneSystem, a secure, multi-tenant cloud-based management service, made Exablox the solution for the firm’s storage needs.

With multiple offices and data centers in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Washington DC, HLB needed an affordable solution that could consolidate storage, scale with the firm’s growth and eliminate storage islands. As the firm’s recovery requirements changed, its backup methodology required a migration from tape to disk. With approximately 50 VMs and 15TB of data, it needed an efficient deduplication solution for long-term retention of critical information. OneBlox’s BYOD strategy and its next-generation object-based file system enabled the scalability, deduplication and reliability required.

As part of its strategy, HLB also wanted to combine its primary litigation imaging and backup storage within its Los Angeles office. Unlike purpose-built backup appliances (PBBA) that cannot support general-purpose applications or expensive legacy SAN arrays that create storage islands, OneBlox has a scale-out architecture that provides the firm with a flexible solution it can use for litigation imaging, Veeam Backup and DR. Exablox’s recent verification with Veeam Backup & Replication allows HLB to use OneBlox as a converged solution, offloading information from its expensive SAN-based storage in Los Angeles and replicating it to San Francisco.

OneBlox is not constrained by RAID volumes, can recover from hardware failures and eliminates storage islands, resulting in flexible capacity that any application with access to the OneBlox ring can consume. Its ability to minimize the impact of a disk-drive failure on business applications also influenced HLB’s decision. Because OneBlox employs an object-based file system, it does not undergo lengthy RAID rebuilds that degrade application performance and put an organization’s information at risk if another disk drive should fail while the RAID volume is being rebuilt. As HLB’s business requirements change in the future, OneBlox is able to support growing capacity requirements in less than 5mn with zero configuration.

“As a mid-sized law firm, our archive storage needs are quite large and growing. I knew right away that legacy solutions were going to be either too expensive, too complex or not flexible enough for us,” said Greg Williams, CTO, HLB. “After looking at next-generation solutions, I realized that Exablox’s object-based file system, with deduplication natively integrated, lent itself perfectly to our requirements. The combination of Veeam Software and Exablox provides an easily managed solution that offers tremendous reliability, effective deduplication and offsite replication – all essential ingredients for a much longer online retention of archived data. This enables IT to offer better recovery services for the firm. OneBlox combines operational simplicity and flexibility for growth in an extremely cost-effective platform.”

“HLB is a perfect example of how law firms can achieve enterprise-grade storage without the hassle and high costs of legacy solutions,” said Douglas Brockett, CEO, Exablox. “OneBlox’s flexibility to mix-and-match drives eliminates guesswork. Firms can purchase exactly the storage capacity they need from the onset and then add any combination of drives at any time to meet growing demands. With OneBlox’s cloud-based management system – OneSystem – law firms can also easily manage storage across their various data centers, giving them all the essential benefits of primary storage, backup and DR in a single, easy-to-deploy appliance.“

Since the flexible, plug-and-play OneBlox requires almost no configuration, law firms can scale performance, capacity and availability non-disruptively. BYOD strategy enables customers to purchase any industry-standard SAS or SATA disk drive to use within an OneBlox ring, bringing pricing down by a factor of 10. OneSystem, a multi-tenant cloud-based management service, offers a four-step configuration for remote storage replication and real-time monitoring and reporting of all drives in an OneBlox ring. Enterprise features such as inline deduplication, CDP and encryption enabled by default minimize waste and maximize utilization, at a fraction of the cost of traditional storage solutions.

OneBlox pricing begins at under $10,000 and is capable of supporting up to 48TB of raw storage capacity in a single appliance.