Law Firm Paul Hastings Installs Riverbed Granite

Riverbed Technology, Inc. announced that Paul Hastings, LLP, an international law firm and a long-time Riverbed customer headquartered in Los Angeles, CA, has installed its Granite branch converged infrastructure solutions across 19 global remote offices to consolidate data to four hub data centers, improving data security and accelerating recovery.

With Granite, the law firm centrally protects data and lowers the TCO of its global operations without sacrificing any of the benefits of having storage at the edge close to users.

Paul Hastings provides legal solutions to many of the world’s top financial institutions and Fortune Global 500 companies. As the firm grew and established offices across Asia, Europe and the US, its IT infrastructure also expanded in each location to meet local performance, protection and recovery requirements leading to data center sprawl and an inefficient use of IT resources. Additionally, as a global law firm, Paul Hastings faced the arduous task of complying with varying international data laws and satisfying client privacy concerns.

Searl Tate, director of engineering, Paul Hastings, enlisted Riverbed as he investigated how to meet remote site requirements, yet reduce the cost and exposure of traditional remote IT infrastructure. With Granite, the law firm’s IT team could consolidate applications, data and servers at the branch into the data center to improve security and centralize backup, while improving the firm’s DR capability for each office. With this new approach, the firm can deliver IT services to remote offices from a secure, central location without compromising local performance needed by branch workers.

“For Paul Hastings to be successful with the Riverbed deployment, it had to be seamless. If our end-user employees can tell we replaced the infrastructure, we’ve failed,” said Tate. “The results have been great. With Granite, the applications perform as they did when the data was stored locally. Branch data is delivered encrypted from the datacenter at local speed, no matter the distance or location and enables the restore of operations in a matter of minutes versus days, maintaining high productivity for branch staff.“

With Granite, Paul Hastings has also transformed its global IT operations. The solution has given the law firm the ability to manage storage and backup centrally without the need for offsite IT support or delegation of administration and backup duties to employees in branch locations. Consolidating storage in the datacenter gives the added assurance of removing risk from branch offices where data wasn’t completely safe from the threat of theft.

“Due to our global operations, removing risk is a key priority to ensure the privacy of our clients,” said Tate. “With Granite deployed around the globe, our data – and our business – is exposed to far less risk since everything is in our secure hub datacenters rather than branch locations where theft was a previous concern.“

Additionally, not having to purchase more storage or backup systems decreases capital expenses and is a source of cost savings for Paul Hastings. By eliminating the need to maintain storage in branch offices, the solution also reduced administration overhead and costs.

Granite Branch Converged Infrastructure Solutions
Granite is a branch converged infrastructure solution that eliminates the headache of branch office IT, consolidating servers and storage into the datacenter without sacrificing any of the benefits of having servers at the edge close to users. It expedites branch office provisioning, backup and recovery and ensures continuous operations when disasters occur such as inclement weather, fire and human-induced outages. Businesses can restore operations in a matter of minutes vs. days, centrally protect and secure data and lower the TCO of branch and remote offices.

Granite is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, a complete platform for location-independent computing. It’s a set of integrated solutions that give companies the flexibility to host applications and data in the locations that best serve the business while ensuring the flawless delivery of those apps to better leverage global resources, reduce the cost of running their business and maximize employee productivity.