Business issues
Pillsbury Winthrop LLP is one of the leading law firms in the United States, providing comprehensive legal services across a wide range of practice disciplines. Supporting the firm's attorneys and staff is a network of more than 150 servers drawing upon a disk farm with an aggregate 20 terabytes of capacity. A large portion of this space is devoted to e-mail information, which typically includes large MS Word legal document attachments. Litigation cases also consume large chunks of capacity and Pillsbury Winthrop's staff diligently scans document hard copies for litigation support. Backing up all this information is critical to Pillsbury Winthrop. Losing documents could expose the firm to significant financial risk, in addition to harming its reputation.

Solutions
Manager of IT Operations Kenji Miyaji opted for a phased approach to implementing the StorageTek solution. Following successful forward-and-backward compatibility testing, he implemented StorageTek L20, L40 and L180 tape libraries in eight of the firm's 17 offices so far. As sites grow, Miyaji is phasing out legacy libraries in favor of appropriate-sized L Series vaults.

Financial benefits
Retiring legacy equipment in favor of StorageTek libraries has eliminated many labor hours per month spent on troubleshooting failing equipment. Higher, ongoing maintenance costs formerly associated with legacy libraries were eliminated as well.

Business benefits
"Following the implementation, tape backup and restore issues have been eliminated," said Miyaji. "This protects the firm against potential damages arising from lost files. It also safeguards Pillsbury Winthrop's brand name and reputation for quality."

Technology benefits
Previously, some backups took close to 24 hours. With the improved L-Series library throughput performance, they now complete backups within the defined backup window.