Lang, Richert, and Patch Law Firm Selects Nakivo

Nakivo, Inc. announced that Lang, Richert, and Patch (LRP) law firm, has selected Nakivo Backup & Replication to protect their VMware environment.

Founded in 1963, LRP is a medium sized law firm located in California’s San Joaquin Valley. The practice is diverse, with national, state, and local clients, relying on the firm’s experience and success in case analysis and litigation, insolvency and bankruptcy, business ethics, transactions, and estate planning.

LRP law firm has an hybrid IT infrastructure, utilizing VMware ESXi hosts and traditional standalone servers, and is slowly transitioning into a virtualized environment. Achieving 24/7 availability of information is a priority because the firm’s attorneys often work not only standard hours, but also can stay working through the night. By being available 24/7, the firm has to protect not only the data that is created on a daily basis, but also the client’s data that is utilized for the cases. If such information would be lost, the firm can lose the case, which is why data redundancy protection is important.

“We have been using another VM backup solution and Synology NAS servers to protect our VMware VMs. The product required a fair amount of IT administration time and had a significant resource overhead. I was not a fan of the notifications system that the software provided, so I wanted a product that would deliver clean reports about every backup job,” says Darin L. Land, director of IT, LRP.

 Land came across Backup & Replication on the Synology package center and installed the product on a DS1513+ NAS with 4GB RAM. Within a day,  Backup & Replication was integrated with their infrastructure and Land started to backup all VMware VMs in the test environment.

“I enjoy the fact that Nakivo Backup & Replication not only runs on the Synology NAS, but also has the backup repository on the NAS itself. Since we have a couple of Synology NAS servers that sort of mirror each other, we now have everything in one platform, and also a copy going to a FreeBSD ZFS repository,” says Land.

“With Nakivo Backup & Replication installed on a Synology NAS, all built-in components are integrated together, so it is fast to deploy and easy to manage the product. I have always been a big fan of the Synology products not only for their ease of use, but also because of the black box appliance philosophy,” says Land.

Backup & Replication enables LRP law firm to consolidate their resources more professionally in terms of the amount of VM storage space available for backups, as well as helps increase VM backup speed.

“I was just blown away about how fast I went from not even knowing anything about the set up to scheduling backup jobs pretty easily. After the initial full VM backup, all subsequent backup jobs are 50% faster than with our previous VM backup tool. VM storage space also dropped by over 20%, so I can now almost double the number of backups,” says Land.

At LRP law firm, most of the backup jobs are scheduled during the night time, while a couple of critical systems are backed up a couple times per day during the afternoon. With the help of the daily reports, Land is aware of all the activities that happen within the product. With the GFS backup retention policy, LRP law firm is also able to maximize the number of recovery points.

While maintaining fast VM backup speed is a huge advantage, having the ability to instantly recover individual files is also crucial to the law firm.

“For us, it is really nice to have an ability to restore files in a pinch. Since our attorneys work with a huge number of files, this feature is a life saver. When time is of the essence and some files were deleted or lost, browsing, identifying, and restoring files in the shortest amount of time and without the full VM restore is amazing,” says Land.

Backup & Replication, installed on a Synology NAS, enables LRP law firm to increase VM backup speed by 50% and reduce VM storage space by 20%. With instant file recovery, the firm can identify lost or deleted files and recover them near-instantly.

“I worked in IT for over 30 years and have experienced many backup systems and I always thought of backups as just a necessary evil. Before Nakivo Backup & Replication, I was never excited about using the backup product, so for sure, I have had a pleasant and surprisingly enjoyable experience with Nakivo Backup & Replication so far,” says Land.