Accelerating Operational Effectiveness and Disaster Recovery with Riverbed

Like so many large Am Law 100 law firms with offices across the United States and around the world, our firm was facing challenges sharing and backing up data, and we wanted to strengthen our disaster recovery (“DR”) capabilities without compromising our operational excellence. Sidley Austin LLP is a 140-year-old international law firm with approximately 1700 lawyers in 17 offices (seven in the United States and 10 more across Asia and Europe). Our challenge was that we had a complex legacy network connecting all the offices. At times, this resulted in slow data transfers, limiting our legal teams' opportunities to efficiently and effectively leverage interoffice resources.

Operational Inefficiencies

Before we could increase firm-wide operational technology efficiencies, we had to address the fact that each office essentially had its own identical stand-alone data center. Over time, and as technology advanced, this approach was becoming more inefficient; it meant that each office had to perform its own backups and have its own separate DR site and plan, coupled with all of the expense and management complexity that comes along with it. We also found it was very difficult to manage and deploy application and OS patches, since each office was responsible for applying its own. When it was time for infrastructure updates, everything had to be purchased, shipped, installed and applied independently in each data center.

Because of the less than ideal connectivity between offices, users could not always collaborate on documents or share data between offices as much as we desired. Our IT department believed that we needed to upgrade our global network, as well as optimize the performance of applications and data transfer over the network.

In addition to adding bandwidth, we began investigating the regionalization of our IT infrastructure by creating two central sites ' one main site and a second DR site ' and then linking each of the remote sites only to the central sites.

Wide area networks (“WANs”) can connect two points that are hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. The cost of the networks increases as they run farther and as their data capacity increases. And, of course, a mesh-style network individually connecting several offices multiplies those costs. Transferring large files across a WAN can take minutes or hours, depending on file size, bandwidth and network congestion. These transfers quickly become impractical as file sizes grow, and as more and more users attempt to share the limited network capacity.

Two of our critical applications are e-mail (Outlook/Exchange) and document management (iManage by Autonomy). Both Exchange and iManage generate a significant amount of network traffic. In addition, some of our applications in general are very sensitive to latency. Therefore, we needed to ensure that we took special care when regionalizing our firm's most strategic applications while upgrading our network.

Our IT department began researching solutions to our legacy networking challenges with an emphasis on leveraging upgraded WAN technology without oversubscribing. Through our research and an overall knowledge of WAN optimization vendors, we knew Riverbed was a leading contender. Gartner's strong recommendation and placement of Riverbed in the top right corner of their most recent Magic Quadrant for the WAN Optimization Controller market was a positive. Also, there is a high degree of adoption of a joint Riverbed/Autonomy Interwoven solution in many law firms. We spoke with many law firms of similar size with similar challenges and found that many of them use Riverbed Steelhead appliances, and that their performance results were very favorable.

Decision Process

After our exhaustive review, including discussions with Gartner, as well as the high degree of adoption within the legal community using Interwoven, our firm chose to acquire and test Riverbed devices between our largest, as well as most remote, locations. After extensive testing and acceptance, we acquired Riverbed Steelhead appliances for each of our seven domestic offices. But instead of acquiring just one Steelhead appliance for each office, we decided to purchase two. The addition of a second Steelhead appliance gives us two significant advantages. First, it increases each office's capacity for network throughput; and second, it provides protection (DR) in the unlikely event that the primary WAN link failed. If the primary link were to fail, the second Steelhead appliance that has been implemented on the secondary WAN link would maintain the same performance as the primary link. We anticipated that once users became accustomed to the dramatic increases in performance, they would not want to give them up, even briefly, should a network link fail.

To manage all of our Steelhead appliances, we also deployed the Riverbed Central Management Console (“CMC”). The CMC simplifies the process of deploying and managing Steelhead appliances distributed across a WAN. The CMC allows us to configure, monitor and report on Steelhead appliances through a standard Web browser. It also gives us visibility into the network performance of specific applications across all of our Steelhead appliances throughout the enterprise. It displays reporting metrics, such as WAN traffic levels, application-throughput and various network flow characteristics going back as much as a full year.

Our IT department's confidence in the ease of deployment was justified when the deployment went smoothly and cleanly. First, we installed the two Steelhead appliances in our Chicago office. As part of that initial implementation, Riverbed helped us develop a set of clear and simple instructions for the remote offices. These were provided to the other offices with the Steelhead appliances as each office was ready to perform its installation. As a result, these later installations were completed by the local staff in each office without incident. We were very pleased with the implementation.

Results

Once the Steelhead appliances were implemented, we saw a tremendous increase in operational efficiency. We were able to consolidate data into two locations, dramatically simplifying data and system management, backups and DR. Interoffice collaboration and communication have increased significantly as it becomes easier for our lawyers and staff to share data between offices. We have begun to consolidate document libraries across all of our domestic offices, which will result in a dramatic decrease in the infrastructure under management.

Overall, I believe our technology staff was very pleased with the Steelhead appliance implementation. Since the Steelhead appliances were implemented, we have seen a 70% reduction in our bandwidth utilization on certain applications such as e-mail. We also anticipate an increase in productivity because local offices are no longer responsible for daily backups. Instead, backups are performed centrally across the WAN, taking less time leveraging our regionalized approach using a number of technologies, including Riverbed. By consolidating our IT infrastructure, we have also reduced our energy costs and have much better control and management of our system lifecycles.

As we continue our consolidation, our lawyers and other staff members will have the ability to easily and quickly access documents across our offices, enabling them to spend more time serving clients and less time waiting for data to transfer. In addition to the improvement in performance, I'm especially excited by the dramatic increase in operational efficiency and excellence across our entire technology portfolio. We increased overall performance and our disaster recovery capabilities, while reducing the amount of data and equipment in each remote office. We are now able to apply patches to our systems across the network quickly and easily, which helps ensure that systems have the correct patches in place in a timely manner and with a minimum of disruption.

I believe that in order to successfully implement any sort of modern technology, it is very important to have goals. Whether it's a Riverbed implementation or some other technology, you need to start with a clear set of goals and a solid understanding of why you want to achieve these goals. At Sidley, Riverbed is part of a larger portfolio of technology that includes not just the applications, systems, storage and networks, but also includes the right people for the right jobs. The technology is important, of course, but without the right internal resources in place you cannot count on the technology.

Like so many large Am Law 100 law firms with offices across the United States and around the world, our firm was facing challenges sharing and backing up data, and we wanted to strengthen our disaster recovery (“DR”) capabilities without compromising our operational excellence. Sidley Austin LLP is a 140-year-old international law firm with approximately 1700 lawyers in 17 offices (seven in the United States and 10 more across Asia and Europe). Our challenge was that we had a complex legacy network connecting all the offices. At times, this resulted in slow data transfers, limiting our legal teams' opportunities to efficiently and effectively leverage interoffice resources.

Operational Inefficiencies

Before we could increase firm-wide operational technology efficiencies, we had to address the fact that each office essentially had its own identical stand-alone data center. Over time, and as technology advanced, this approach was becoming more inefficient; it meant that each office had to perform its own backups and have its own separate DR site and plan, coupled with all of the expense and management complexity that comes along with it. We also found it was very difficult to manage and deploy application and OS patches, since each office was responsible for applying its own. When it was time for infrastructure updates, everything had to be purchased, shipped, installed and applied independently in each data center.

Because of the less than ideal connectivity between offices, users could not always collaborate on documents or share data between offices as much as we desired. Our IT department believed that we needed to upgrade our global network, as well as optimize the performance of applications and data transfer over the network.

In addition to adding bandwidth, we began investigating the regionalization of our IT infrastructure by creating two central sites ' one main site and a second DR site ' and then linking each of the remote sites only to the central sites.

Wide area networks (“WANs”) can connect two points that are hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. The cost of the networks increases as they run farther and as their data capacity increases. And, of course, a mesh-style network individually connecting several offices multiplies those costs. Transferring large files across a WAN can take minutes or hours, depending on file size, bandwidth and network congestion. These transfers quickly become impractical as file sizes grow, and as more and more users attempt to share the limited network capacity.

Two of our critical applications are e-mail (Outlook/Exchange) and document management (iManage by Autonomy). Both Exchange and iManage generate a significant amount of network traffic. In addition, some of our applications in general are very sensitive to latency. Therefore, we needed to ensure that we took special care when regionalizing our firm's most strategic applications while upgrading our network.

Our IT department began researching solutions to our legacy networking challenges with an emphasis on leveraging upgraded WAN technology without oversubscribing. Through our research and an overall knowledge of WAN optimization vendors, we knew Riverbed was a leading contender. Gartner's strong recommendation and placement of Riverbed in the top right corner of their most recent Magic Quadrant for the WAN Optimization Controller market was a positive. Also, there is a high degree of adoption of a joint Riverbed/Autonomy Interwoven solution in many law firms. We spoke with many law firms of similar size with similar challenges and found that many of them use Riverbed Steelhead appliances, and that their performance results were very favorable.

Decision Process

After our exhaustive review, including discussions with Gartner, as well as the high degree of adoption within the legal community using Interwoven, our firm chose to acquire and test Riverbed devices between our largest, as well as most remote, locations. After extensive testing and acceptance, we acquired Riverbed Steelhead appliances for each of our seven domestic offices. But instead of acquiring just one Steelhead appliance for each office, we decided to purchase two. The addition of a second Steelhead appliance gives us two significant advantages. First, it increases each office's capacity for network throughput; and second, it provides protection (DR) in the unlikely event that the primary WAN link failed. If the primary link were to fail, the second Steelhead appliance that has been implemented on the secondary WAN link would maintain the same performance as the primary link. We anticipated that once users became accustomed to the dramatic increases in performance, they would not want to give them up, even briefly, should a network link fail.

To manage all of our Steelhead appliances, we also deployed the Riverbed Central Management Console (“CMC”). The CMC simplifies the process of deploying and managing Steelhead appliances distributed across a WAN. The CMC allows us to configure, monitor and report on Steelhead appliances through a standard Web browser. It also gives us visibility into the network performance of specific applications across all of our Steelhead appliances throughout the enterprise. It displays reporting metrics, such as WAN traffic levels, application-throughput and various network flow characteristics going back as much as a full year.

Our IT department's confidence in the ease of deployment was justified when the deployment went smoothly and cleanly. First, we installed the two Steelhead appliances in our Chicago office. As part of that initial implementation, Riverbed helped us develop a set of clear and simple instructions for the remote offices. These were provided to the other offices with the Steelhead appliances as each office was ready to perform its installation. As a result, these later installations were completed by the local staff in each office without incident. We were very pleased with the implementation.

Results

Once the Steelhead appliances were implemented, we saw a tremendous increase in operational efficiency. We were able to consolidate data into two locations, dramatically simplifying data and system management, backups and DR. Interoffice collaboration and communication have increased significantly as it becomes easier for our lawyers and staff to share data between offices. We have begun to consolidate document libraries across all of our domestic offices, which will result in a dramatic decrease in the infrastructure under management.

Overall, I believe our technology staff was very pleased with the Steelhead appliance implementation. Since the Steelhead appliances were implemented, we have seen a 70% reduction in our bandwidth utilization on certain applications such as e-mail. We also anticipate an increase in productivity because local offices are no longer responsible for daily backups. Instead, backups are performed centrally across the WAN, taking less time leveraging our regionalized approach using a number of technologies, including Riverbed. By consolidating our IT infrastructure, we have also reduced our energy costs and have much better control and management of our system lifecycles.

As we continue our consolidation, our lawyers and other staff members will have the ability to easily and quickly access documents across our offices, enabling them to spend more time serving clients and less time waiting for data to transfer. In addition to the improvement in performance, I'm especially excited by the dramatic increase in operational efficiency and excellence across our entire technology portfolio. We increased overall performance and our disaster recovery capabilities, while reducing the amount of data and equipment in each remote office. We are now able to apply patches to our systems across the network quickly and easily, which helps ensure that systems have the correct patches in place in a timely manner and with a minimum of disruption.

I believe that in order to successfully implement any sort of modern technology, it is very important to have goals. Whether it's a Riverbed implementation or some other technology, you need to start with a clear set of goals and a solid understanding of why you want to achieve these goals. At Sidley, Riverbed is part of a larger portfolio of technology that includes not just the applications, systems, storage and networks, but also includes the right people for the right jobs. The technology is important, of course, but without the right internal resources in place you cannot count on the technology.