Leveraging DR-Scout: Howard Rice Lowers TCO And Streamlines Backups With A Disaster Recovery Solution

By InMage

The Challenge: Shrinking Backup Windows and Rising TCO
Howard Rice's information technology infrastructure is centralized in its San Francisco headquarters. The platform environment is Microsoft-centric, with a moderate amount of Linux. HP/Compaq servers are primarily used, along with high density network-attached storage (NAS) appliances from Network Appliance. As the firm's total storage capacity rapidly approached 12 TB from a current capacity of 10 TB, this created shrinking backup windows that impacted the performance of other business systems and overall employee productivity.

"Our business drivers were twofold: First, we needed a disaster recovery solution to replicate data in real time," says Matt Reynolds, CIO of Howard Rice. "The traditional tape backup restoration we had in place was not meeting our needs. The firm's data is growing at such an exponential rate that backups were running well into business hours, resulting in degradation of business systems. For example, even though MS Exchange was well tuned, backups were extending well into the business day. While this was relatively transparent to Firm personnel, the IT Team was well aware of the degradation. We shut the backups down to confirm they were the problem, and indeed system performance picked up. So we had to create a backup strategy that would be transparent to all Firm personnel. The second driver was reducing the total cost of ownership of our backup strategy –this included hardware, software and labor costs."