Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, LLP Backs Up Critical Legal Data Faster by Using Cohesity Software on AWS

Shumaker is a full-service business law firm that provides legal services to individuals, small businesses, healthcare providers, nonprofit organizations, and Fortune 500 and international corporations. As the firm’s data has grown, it has struggled to back up and replicate that data using an existing legacy infrastructure. Specifically, Shumaker has six data centers and had been using multiple data recovery and storage technologies that were difficult to manage. “We had two different backup systems, and restoring data was problematic,” says Carl Holzhauer, Supervisor of Infrastructure at Shumaker. “Data backups took an average of 30 hours to complete. If someone urgently needed an old email or other document, we just couldn’t get it to them in less than a day.”

To solve its challenges, Shumaker wanted to move to a next-generation cloud-based solution for data backup, restore, and retention.

A third-party vendor referred Shumaker to Cohesity, an IT solution provider that offers software for data backup and management. Cohesity, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Competency Partner and an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner, provides software that natively supports the AWS Cloud. Cohesity solutions include DataProtect, which delivers comprehensive data protection with policy-based management for any workload. “The vast majority of enterprise data—backups, archives, file shares, object stores, and data used for dev/test and analytics—sits in fragmented infrastructure silos, which makes it hard to protect, expensive to manage, and difficult to analyze,” says Jeanette Geary, Senior Alliances Marketing Manager for Cohesity. “Our solutions consolidate multiple data storage workloads to simplify data backup and storage.”

Shumaker worked with Cohesity to archive backup data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for long-term retention. Shumaker also uses Cohesity Helios, a software-based application management solution. In addition, Cohesity supports AWS services including Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive for long-term data retention, as well as application data backup from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

Taking advantage of Cohesity’s web-based data management platform, the firm can leverage APIs and support for AWS to simplify data management and gain a single view of its backup and restore infrastructure. Shumaker uses Cohesity to target the cloud, uploading a full data backup to AWS once a month and retaining data for six months. The Cohesity solution also features built-in deduplication capabilities, which can accelerate data backups. In addition to using Cohesity for backup and restore, long-term retention, and archiving to AWS, Shumaker plans to implement Cohesity for scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) to manage file shares.

By using Cohesity, Shumaker was able to implement a unified data backup and restore solution. “Cohesity enabled us to consolidate from two cumbersome solutions to a single platform, with immediate time and resource savings,” says Holzhauer. As a result, Shumaker has a centralized view of its entire data backup, storage and retention infrastructure. “We can run the solution locally or from Helios, and it gives us a dashboard view of everything in the environment,” says Holzhauer.

Taking advantage of the Cohesity solution, Shumaker has significantly reduced the amount of time required to back up critical data. “Previously, it took 30 hours—more than a day—to do backups because of the load it put on our system,” says Holzhauer. “Now, using Cohesity, I can run SQL Server backups every 15 minutes, without impacting the system. Our employees don’t notice any difference in application performance while we’re doing this.” The firm has also reduced its Microsoft Exchange email backup times by 99 percent.

Shumaker can now ensure all critical data is replicated, even in the event of a disaster. “We have four office locations that are in a hurricane path,” Holzhauer says. “If we had a building taken out by a hurricane, and we didn’t have data backed up at that site, that’s obviously a huge problem. Using Cohesity, we’re able to avoid any potential data loss by automatically replicating data from those locations to our non-hurricane locations.”

The law firm has also used Cohesity to reduce its backup storage footprint across all six office locations hosting data. “By reducing the backup footprint, we’re saving money every month by not paying for that additional tape storage,” says Holzhauer. Looking ahead, Shumaker expects to implement additional Cohesity applications that check for malware and viruses during backups. “We have cut ties with other vendors because of the lack of strong support,” says Holzhauer. “That isn’t the case with Cohesity—the support has been excellent, and we love what the technology is enabling us to do.”