Databarracks: How an international law firm saves time and money
Databarracks’ case study
How an international law firm saves time and money through backup and disaster recovery as a service.
About Memery Crystal
Memery Crystal is a specialist international law firm, based in London. It specialises in three sectors; ‘Commercial, Media & Technology’, ‘Retail & Leisure’, and ‘Natural Resources’. In 2015, Memery Crystal partnered with the Chinese law firm, Yingke. The two work together to help clients across four continents and ten major commercial regions around the world.
The Challenge Databarracks started working with Memery Crystal in 2016, initially providing Disaster Recovery as a Service.
Tim Bond joined Memery Crystal in 2017 as the IT Director. Upon Tim’s arrival, Memery Crystal also wanted Databarracks to look after its backups.
“When I arrived, Memery Crystal had been doing tape backup for years. If we’d needed to restore data from, say, a week ago, there was little confidence this could be achieved reliably, accurately and easily. Unsurprisingly, the Board weren’t comfortable running that level of risk.”
The Solution In 2016 Databarracks implemented Disaster Recovery as a Service, replicating key production VMs, using Zerto. This means Memery Crystal can spin-up its failover servers in 15-30 minutes during a disaster scenario and run failover testing whenever they need to.
Later, Memery Crystal supplemented DRaaS with Backup as a Service.For both services, Databarracks handled the installation of the software, initial data seeding, testing and monitoring.
“We were really impressed with how, in particular, when setting up the Backup solution, we were able to do it without affecting DRaaS – so we were always protected.”
The Benefits “Before Databarracks took on Backup, they were already limiting our exposure to data loss by extending our replication journal as far back as 30 days – this was necessary to protect against data corruption or accidental deletion. But, the extended journal impacts on replica storage and, therefore, cost. However, once Databarracks started doing Backup on top of DR, we were able to significantly reduce the size of our replica storage.
“The board green lit the Backup solution. Databarracks made it easy to pitch, in no small part because it was cost neutral. We saved time and money and, best of all, gave us complete confidence.”
“I can sum up Databarracks with this observation; I emailed the DB team with a question and within 5 minutes I had a knowledgeable person on the phones giving me the answers and offering to fix the problem for me. It was just the perfect support experience. By some distance, these guys are the best I deal with.”
“After my appointment to Memery Crystal, Databarracks were proactive and quickly got in touch to arrange a meet up and understand how we wanted to work. Myself included, there is an IT team of 4 and while our estate is relatively small, it is crucial for Memery Crystal as a business. I feel Databarracks has always understood that.
“Managing the estate doesn’t take up too much time, as Databarracks are proactive in monitoring the Zerto replication. If the servers get more than 5 minutes out of sync, Databarracks will ring to fix any issues.
“Concerning Backup, I get an email each morning with a summary of the backup estate. On average, twice a month something needs looking at. But again, this doesn’t fill me with dread. The team always sort out issues quickly and efficiently.
“Because the data is replicated in near-real time, we can recover with minimal data loss. In theory, our estate should be down 2 hours at the absolute maximum. As a law firm with resilience baked into email and phone systems too, our employees could work effectively that way for a day, if not longer.
“Our next big project is a desktop refresh, before focusing on business efficiencies. We’re now comfortable and confident to take on these projects because Databarracks have helped us to get the foundations right.”
