Law Firm Offers DR Proof

When it comes to disaster recovery, the network engineering manager at law firm Pillsbury Winthrop LLP likes to see the evidence.

Albert Ganzons staff conducts semiannual failover tests to make sure they can retrieve data in a worst-case scenario. It's always worked so far -- as much because of the planning as the technology.

To build his case, Ganzon installed WANSynch software from startup XOsoft in the middle of 2003 (see XOsoft Turns Back Time and XOSoft Readies Replication). Then he started testing again. “We’ve done failover to make sure we go through the exact process, and our lawyers will be able to keep working,” Ganzon says.

The tests have gone well. “We’ve done it with minimal impact on the user. Of course, there’s a few minutes they can’t get to the primary server, but they get it right back.”

Ganzon says he chose WANSyncHA over SRDF from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT) clustering product because it provides a synchronized replica of any server that can automatically take over if that server goes down.“One of the features I really like was the ability to failover to another machine and that machine can spoof the identify of the first machine,” Ganzon says. “Also, I’m impressed with its ability to replicate across the WAN.”

Pillsbury Winthrop isn't your local legal shop. It has around 750 lawyers and 2,500 employees in 16 offices around the world, who have to keep working to get those billable hours up. They consider continuous availability to Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server crucial, because losing either could prevent access to clients and documents.

“An outage would cost millions of dollars even for one day -- more, if one of our major hub sites goes down,” Ganzon says. “We have hundreds of attorney and partners. And as you know, we charge by the hour, so you can’t do any cost recovery if you have an outage.”

Ganzon says the firm stores around 50 Tbytes of data on a Symmetrix SAN from EMC and a NAS system from Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP). Ganzon's team uses WANSynchHA for replication and synchronization on Exchange and SQL Servers.

But disaster recovery requires non-technical planning as well. In Pillsbury Winthrop’s case, there are four major North American hubs where WANSynchHA is installed: San Francisco, Southern California, New York, and Northern Virginia. Ganzon designs his DR around the level of risk in those geographic areas.“If the San Francisco peninsula falls into the Pacific Ocean, we have to be able to failover to one of our hub offices,” he says. In case of a San Francisco disaster, data from the West Coast hubs would failover to the Northern Virginia site. “We picked Virginia because of issues with New York City,” Ganzon says, referring to 9/11 and the power blackout of 2003. If there’s a problem with the East Coast sites first, they failover to San Francisco.

Ganzon says Pillsbury Winthrop plans for three types of outages:

Even if the firm never experiences a disaster, the planning and testing will come in handy next June when the firm shuts the San Francisco office for renovation, part of which includes redesigning the data center. Ganzon will move data and voice services to the Virginia hub. "We're planning on it taking the entire weekend, but maybe it won't take that long."

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

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