VAR Ensures Law Firm's Business Continuity With BDR

When a regional law firm with several offices in the Boston area needed a BCS (business continuity solution), it turned to IT4, a Woburn, MA, outsourced provider of IT solutions and services, for assistance. Due to the law firm's organizational structure, several remote sites receive e-mail from a set of servers in the main office. The firm specializes in handling real estate transactions, and its incoming e-mail often contains mission-critical information such as closing documents and contracts. The timely receipt and delivery of these documents is a must. "The firm had several solutions in place to address data redundancy, including multiple failover Internet lines at each location," explains Brett Jaffe, president of IT4. Maintaining failover lines is a method of ensuring Internet connectivity remains stable by having a secondary connection take over when the primary connection fails. "However, addressing e-mail was a different issue, since the firm did not have the budget to deploy and manage a clustered application [multiple e-mail servers that could provide e-mail failover]," says Jaffe.

To resolve that challenge, IT4 installed a BDR (backup disaster and recovery) solution from Zenith Infotech to provide the failover necessary. This solution yields the benefits of off-site backup, as well as the ability for a quick disaster recovery onto the new hardware with no downtime for the client and no loss of data. The solution was tested just three weeks after it was installed. A critical RAID (redundant array of independent disks) controller error caused the firm's server to go down at 3 a.m. Using the BDR from Zenith Infotech, the IT4 NOC (network operation center) was able to perform a quick diagnosis of the issue and remotely create a virtual server environment for the e-mail server in less than 10 minutes on the Zenith NAS (network attached storage) system. At 8 a.m., when business began as usual at the law firm, employees were unaware that their critical e-mail systems were running in a virtual environment due to hardware failure. In addition, by performing liaison services with the hardware manufacturer to replace the defective controller, IT4 was able to have the virtual server restored by 6 p.m. on that same day.