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NearPoint Solved the Case for Law Firm Kirton and McConkie |
"Before NearPoint we were at risk of
losing up to a week's worth of data but
now if the server should to go down or
become corrupt, the potential for data
loss is minimal. |
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As one of Utah's largest law firms, Kirton & McConkie provides its clients with a full range of legal services both in the United States and internationally. The firm takes pride in providing quality legal work at a reasonable price to all of its clients, whether they are individuals, small businesses, large corporations, or multinational institutions. Kirton & McConkie has received the highest rating for professional and ethical standards by Martindale-Hubbell, and is listed in the prestigious Bar Register in its list of "preeminent law firms" in the United States.
The Salt Lake City law fi rm has 70 lawyers and additional support staff who use email as a primary method to communicate with each other, clients, investigators and others essential to their cases. For Kirton & McConkie, email has become the most important record of business communication. They had used a backup product to perform a full Exchange database backup on the weekends and incremental backups during the week but the tape backup software did not support the ability to search for information contained in an email or attachment. Additionally, increased activity and large attachments, sometimes as big as 2 or 3 gigabytes, had grown the Exchange database to an unmanageable 120 GB. The risk of losing pertinent information was daunting, and managing email data and maintaining seamless access to archived information became a mission-critical task.
Joel Woodall, Kirton and McConkie's Network Administrator was immediately impressed with Mimosa System's NearPoint, a unified solution that provides email archiving, recovery and storage management. NearPoint promised to relieve the storage pressure caused by Kirton & McConkie's "save everything" policy and to create "super-sized" mailboxes for the partners and staff. NearPoint also promised to provide easy access to the indexed email archive for partners and staff to perform quick legal discovery using the NearPoint eDiscovery Option, an add-on to Mimosa NearPoint.
Restoring messages and attachments was equally important. "We were relying on disk-to-disk and tape backup, but restoring data from backup tapes could take up to three days. Fortunately, we have never experienced a catastrophic loss requiring full restoration of data, but we did have the need to restore individual messages or string of messages. Although this was virtually impossible to do using the traditional tape backup solution, NearPoint could accomplish that in just minutes," says Woodall.
With NearPoint deployed, now all of Kirton and McConkie's Exchange data is protected using the NearPoint Application Shadowing which is a continuous data protection method. Using NearPoint, there is no long "backup window" because everything is captured in near real-time using the Exchange transaction log fi les. Adds Woodall, "Before NearPoint we were at risk of losing up to a week's worth of data but now if the server should to go down or become corrupt, the potential for data loss is minimal. This gives everyone peace of mind." Now all of Kirton and McConkie's email data is protected without impacting the firm's productivity.
Using NearPoint, Woodall has eliminated mailbox quotas for end users, providing them with "super-size" mailboxes. With NearPoint Mailbox Extension, Woodall defi ned policies that allowed mailboxes on the Exchange Servers to be extended to the NearPoint server. Messages were then migrated using parameters such as message size and age and mailbox size watermarks. Using these policies, NearPoint extracted the appropriate messages and attachments and replaced them with stub files that point to the copy of the message residing on the NearPoint server.
Woodall instituted policies that extracted messages older than 30 days and larger than 500 KB. This allowed him to "shrink" the Exchange database by 100 GB. Today the Exchange database is an effi cient 20 GB.
At Kirton & McConkie, the IT staff often receives requests from partners or staff asking to find email communication for a case or client. In the past, this was a diffi cult and time-consuming procedure. With NearPoint's eDiscovery Option deployed, partners and staff can quickly perform large and sophisticated search and discovery across all Exchange items including emails, calendar entries, contacts, etc. A wide range of search features allow messages to be easily discovered and culled, including multi-level searches, identifying BCCs, and tracing conversation threads. What used to take almost a day's work to accomplish now takes minutes.
"Last year, we had a legal case that required full search and discovery of all email communication for a particular client. Without NearPoint, we had to mount and search old backup tapes, a process that took days and weeks and countless man hours. Using NearPoint, we can quickly search our entire email archive in minutes," declares Woodall.
With 175 users now using NearPoint, Kirton and McConkie is realizing benefi ts across the organization, from reducing storage on Exchange, to allowing fast search and discovery of all the archived data, all while improving overall Exchange Server performance.
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