Law Firm Memery Crystal Chooses Databarracks

Memery Crystal LLP is an international law firm, based in London, UK.

It specialises in three sectors; commercial, media an technology, retail and leisure, and natural resources.

In 2015, it partnered with the Chinese law firm, Yingke. The two work together to help clients across four continents and ten major commercial regions around the world.

Challenge
Databarracks Ltd started working with Memery Crystal in 2016, initially providing DR as a Service.

Tim Bond joined Memery Crystal in 2017 as the IT director. Upon his arrival, he also wanted Databarracks to look after its backups: “When I arrived, Memery Crystal had been doing tape backup for years. If we’d needed to restore data from, say, a week ago, there was little confidence this could be achieved reliably, accurately and easily. Unsurprisingly, the Board weren’t comfortable running that level of risk.“

Solution
In 2016 Databarracks implemented DR as a Service, replicating key production VMs, using Zerto Ltd. This means Memery Crystal can spin-up its failover servers in 15-30 minutes during a disaster scenario and run failover testing whenever they need to.

Later, Memery Crystal supplemented DRaaS with Backup as a Service. For both services, Databarracks handled the installation of the software, initial data seeding, testing and monitoring.

“We were really impressed with how, in particular, when setting up the Backup solution, we were able to do it without affecting DRaaS – so we were always protected,” said Bond.

Bonds’s comments on benefits:
“Before Databarracks took on backup, they were already limiting our exposure to data loss by extending our replication journal as far back as 30 days – this was necessary to protect against data corruption or accidental deletion. But, the extended journal impacts on replica storage and, therefore, cost. However, once Databarracks started doing backup on top of DR, we were able to significantly reduce the size of our replica storage. The board green lit the backup solution. Databarracks made it easy to pitch, in no small part because it was cost neutral. We saved time and money and, best of all, gave us complete confidence.

“I can sum up Databarracks with this observation; I emailed the DB team with a question and within 5 minutes I had a knowledgeable person on the phones giving me the answers and offering to fix the problem for me. It was just the perfect support experience. By some distance, these guys are the best I deal with.

“After my appointment to Memery Crystal, Databarracks were proactive and quickly got in touch to arrange a meet up and understand how we wanted to work. Myself included, there is an IT team of 4 and while our estate is relatively small, it is crucial for Memery Crystal as a business. I feel Databarracks has always understood that.“