CUSTOMER PROFILE 
A division of a top-ranked legal research firm, this company is a leading provider of authoritative legal information in print, on CD, and online. The company's comprehensive products and services span all major practice areas and are highly regarded by customers in more than 160 countries.
CHALLENGE
The company's well-run distribution center depended upon an older storage infrastructure and some creative IT workarounds to manage over 2 terabytes of data. With the parent company's decision to move distribution for new acquisitions through the center, however, data volumes were expected to increase significantly and the current environment was clearly inadequate to handle the new influx.
The server and storage infrastructure included soon-to-be-unsupported versions of Solaris and were already operating at peak capacity. Disk subsystems had reached maximum capacity and could not be to expanded or upgraded further. Tape libraries were exceeding 80% of their capacity and were expected to reach their limit within months.
Backup had become a tremendous burden requiring a great deal of manual intervention and daily management. IT staffers moved files from disk to tape and then back to disk when they were needed again, creating a serious performance bottleneck.
The company's storage problems needed to be addressed quickly to meet the parent company's business objectives.
SOLUTION
Daymark Solutions' extensive experience implementing complex storage infrastructures made it a perfect partner. Working closely with the firm's internal IT resources, Daymark's professionals architected a storage and backup and recovery environment that included an EMC storage array with expanded memory, I/O capacity and performance, a new high performance server, Legato backup software and an SDLT tape library with six tape transports.
To minimize the impact on the client's current operations, Daymark integrated and staged the entire infrastructure at its leading-edge Integration Center (IC). Once deployed, the client's IT staff came to the IC to test the solution and receive comprehensive training.
Daymark then shipped the new infrastructure to the client's distribution center, installed it, converted the existing data, and seamlessly moved the new system into production.
Performance, ease of management and reliability all improved dramatically. With over 4 terabytes of raw capacity, the company can keep all file systems on line and available, eliminating the need to retrieve data from tape. As for scalability, the capacity of the tape library increased by nearly a factor of three within the existing footprint, ensuring effective management of its own data and that of newly acquired companies for several years with no additional operational overhead.