Case Study: Reed Smith achieves a 20% smaller server footprint and virtually zero migration downtime with NetIQ PlateSpin

Reed Smith - Customer Case Study

Reed Smith LLP, a global law firm with about 1,600 attorneys across 22 offices, needed a fail-safe, hardware-agnostic disaster recovery solution and a simpler way to refresh hardware and migrate servers because any downtime directly affects billable hours and trial preparations. Their SAN-based DR approach was no longer image-compatible with newer hardware in European and Asian data centers, so the firm sought a solution that could provide application-level failover between sites.

Reed Smith deployed Micro Focus PlateSpin Protect at a Pittsburgh disaster recovery site to run up-to-date backup virtual machines for fast failover/failback, and used PlateSpin Migrate to perform large-scale physical-to-physical and physical-to-virtual conversions. The firm reduced its server footprint by 20%, cut server migration time from six months to two months, virtually eliminated downtime during migrations, enabled recovery of multiple sites on the same hardware in minutes, and significantly lowered labor costs.

Reed Smith

Geoff Grayson

Server Team Lead