Best Practices in Legal IT. How to share data and protect critical assets across the WAN

Transcription

1 Best Practices in Legal IT How to share data and protect critical assets across the WAN

2 Agenda Requirements for Data Center outsourcing Timothy Titus, Director of Managed Network Services Overcoming WAN challenges Damon Ennis, VP of Product Management and Customer Support An end user perspective Bill Costello, Director of Computer Services

3 Requirements for Data Center Outsourcing Timothy Titus Director of Managed Network Services

4 Technologies Reduce Disaster Recovery Intervals, but at an Increasing Cost LexisNexis Confidential Industry Estimated Costs Planning software - $10,000 for a few users to $175,000 for a web-server license for many users Off-site high-capacity tape storage - $25,000/month plus equipment costs Off-site SANs Start around $18,000/month plus equipment costs continuity systems Range from a low of $.17 to $.82/user per month Alternative power sources (Generators, building-wide UPSs, etc.) Range in price from $50,000 to $250,000 A Hot Site Can cost approximately $20,000/month $100,000/year to create and maintain a BC/DR team

5 What are your real recovery needs? All firms should have a BCP/DR plan that fits their needs. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Typically exponential costs to reduce both Usually not considered as part of backup strategy Everyone wants zero downtime and zero data loss What does your business really require? Prioritization What apps need to be back up and running first? In a real disaster, what will my customers expect? Tolerate? Most firms get a poor Return on Investment because they fail to prioritize

6 Keys to Success in Developing a Plan Firm Management Participation Successful Development of Plan has focused on participation across organization. Top-Down Approach is best model. Determination of Business Drivers In conjunction with determination of RTO/RPO Firm s Overall Goals Established Upfront Agreement of Priorities, Staging and Benefits.

7 Questions to Ask What are the priorities? Can we do this internally or outsource? What are the technology options? What is the standard for law firms? What can the firm afford to invest?

8 Requirements Design and Cost Modeling Detailed Planning and Implementation Operation and Support Key Deliverables: 1. Requirements 2. Solution Options 3. Technology Operations 4. Operation Plan 5. Implementation Plan and Schedule 6. Preliminary Cost Estimates 7. Determination of RTO/RPO 8. Communication Plan Management Checkpoint Key Deliverables 1. Detailed Planning/ Scheduling : 2. Technology Installation and Testing 3. Applications Testing 4. Detailed Concept of Operations 5. Updated Cost Estimates 6. Communication Tests Management Checkpoint Key Deliverables 1. Operations 2. Maintenance 3. Capacity and growth management 4. Regular Management Reviews 5. Regular Test of Communications 6. Consistent review of RTO/RPO Targets

9 Objectives of Any Plan Respond to layers of business interruptions through a standardized approach. Maintain client service at a minimum level while recovering and doing so in a cost-effective manner. Build in automatic response and procedures so that Life Safety can be a priority.

10 A Holistic Approach Emergency Response Preservation of Life Crisis Communication Technology Recovery Business Continuity Reaching Employees and Clients Testing & Maintenance Processes to Keep the Firm Running

11 What are the risks? Three Types of Risks to Analyze Catastrophic Serious interruption in a large area that creates a life-threatening situation for employees. Localized Event that limits access to one or more key offices or makes work within those offices impossible. Infrastructure Outside systems are disabled while the firm s environment is safe.

12 Overcoming WAN Challenges Speed Application Performance between offices Damon Ennis Damon Ennis VP of Product VP, Management Product Management and Customer and Customer Support Support Silver Peak Systems

13 Today s IT Challenges Ohio Backup Replication Recovery NY Application Delivery Remote Backup WAN Limited bandwidth High Latency Packet loss LA London Business Challenges: Increasing volume of data Increasing distances between locations Tight RTO/RPO Requirements Cost and availability of bandwidth Manageability

14 The Need for WAN Acceleration Poor WAN performance can jeopardize backup, replication and recovery Unique branch office vs data center challenges exist Special WAN optimization requirements on fat pipes NY London 155 Mbps 155 Mbps Data center challenges: Cannot meet RPO/RTO Diverse application mix Bandwidth (cost/availability) WAN Limited bandwidth High latency Packet loss Branch Office challenges: Servers need to be centralized LAN performance expectations Data security issues DS-1 45 Mbps SF Denver

15 The Evolution of WAN Acceleration Circa 2000 Today LZ Based Compression Disk Based Data Reduction Dictionary Size 32 KB Dictionary Size 3TB 2-3 Compression x Data Reduction Low Speed Technology 2 Mbps in, 512 kbps out Software DES Compression Focused No Latency Mitigation No Loss Mitigation High Speed, Nx64 bit HW 1-2 Gbps in, Mbps out 128 bit AES encryption Response time / RTO Focused TCP/CIFS Acceleration Forward Packet Recovery

16 Data Reduction Accelerates Transfers Transparently intercept traffic flowing across the WAN Fingerprint packet content at the byte level Deliver duplicate data from a local instance rather than across the network Maintain data encrypted in transit and at rest

17 Address ALL WAN Limitations L7 Application Acceleration CIFS Acceleration Bandwidth Latency Packet loss Out of order packets L4 TCP Acceleration L3 QoS B/W management Classification Queuing Network Memory Disk based data reduction Compression Forward Error Correction (FEC) Real-time packet recovery Packet Order Correction (POC) Real-time packet reordering

18 Typical Performance Improvements HTTP Downloads Web Applications Database (SQL) File Transfer (CIFS) (MAPI) (Notes) Video Streaming Replication (e.g. VVR) Backup (e.g. Legato) Key 1x 2x 5x 10x 20x 50x 100x 200x 500x Typical Aggregate Performance Peak Performance

19 What can WAN Optimization do for your Law firm? Share knowledge management resources between locations Accelerate the performance of file, , and document management Ensure fast and reliable replication, backup, and disaster recovery across the WAN.

20 Case Study Background: Law firm with 5 regional offices (NY, Boston, SF, LA, D.C) 2 dedicated co-location facilities for Disaster Recovery (San Jose, Boston) Up to 5 GBytes transferred daily between each location WAN links range between 50Mbps and 155 Mbps today Presently use a single MPLS provider; Plan to add redundant MPLS links Challenge: 75 ms latency on cross-country links; Only getting 10% WAN bandwidth utilization Poor Web (HTTP/S), (MAPI), and CIFS file performance across WAN; poorly performing SharePoint and SQL-based financial application Stringent data replication needs between San Jose and Boston Data privacy a major requirement

21 Case Study (continued) Solution: Conducted test on 45 Mbps, Boston-SF link Chose NX-7500 for Ability to scale to 155 Mbps Only appliance with disk encryption TCP acceleration for latency mitigation Results: 10-20x average improvement 21x improvement for data replication Latency sensitive financial application (SQL) delivered with LAN-like performance Over 80% data reduction on average

22 Why Silver Peak? Scalability - the best performance on Fat Pipes Highest bandwidth 500 Mbps Largest data store 7 Terabytes Greatest flow count 256,000 flows More applications supported Data reduction on all applications (TCP and UDP) Lowest Latency (real-time and interactive applications) End-to-end security Line rate encryption - at rest (AES) Line rate encryption - in flight (IPsec) Silver Peak Systems provides the best current offering among WAN optimization appliances July 2007

23 An End User Perspective Bill Costello, Director of Computer Services

24 Who is Arnold & Porter LLP? An international law firm of approximately 600 attorneys (founded in 1946) Offices in Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, London, and Brussels. Maintains more than 25 practice areas including litigation, transactional matters, and regulatory issues.

25 Network Diagram London Brussels 45 Mbps (DS3) Data Center (LexisNexis OH) New York, NY McLean, VA AT&T MPLS WAN 45 Mbps (DS3) Washington, DC HQ and Data Center Denver, CO San Francisco, CA Washington, DC (Market Square) Los Angeles, CA Washington, DC (Tenleytown)

26 The Challenge Application latency Slow performance in Brussels ( stored in London) Improve imanage DMS, Lotus Notes, CIFS (directory browsing) performance across the WAN Server consolidation effort Bring all servers and storage into main data centers; cannot do without WAN optimization Improve the performance of host based replication performance. Could move the data, just not fast enough between Washington DC and LexisNexis DC in Ohio despite 200Mb point to point.

27 Finding the Right Solution Scalability a big requirement Big WAN links coming into Data Centers (45 Mbps MPLS Mbps fiber) Must support a variety of applications File, , document management + VoIP and SQL Two primary WAN optimization vendors evaluated Tested on live link in Washington DC area Ultimately selected Silver Peak s NX appliances Studies indicated best performance on DS-3 and 200 Mbps links Ability to reduce packet loss on MPLS and IP VPNs VoIP and UDP support Disk encryption without performance issues Bi-directional caching

28 Sample Results Primary Applications

29 Overall Bandwidth Improvement

30 Additional Considerations Carefully plan using the SP deployment guide. Know network and routing configuration Identify any potential bottlenecks Don t forget to baseline Easier to prove an ROI when you have a starting point Don t underestimate the value of good support Work with reliable integrator and vendors

31 Q & A Requirements for Data Center outsourcing Timothy Titus, Director of Managed Network Services Overcoming WAN challenges Damon Ennis, VP of Product Management and Customer Support An end user perspective Bill Costello, Director of Computer Services