AmLaw 200 Firm Doubles Capacity at Half the Price of its Legacy NAS with ClearSky Data’s On-Demand Primary Storage Service

USA/Canada News

27
Aug
2019

Editor

ClearSky Data, provider of on-demand primary storage with built-in offsite backup and disaster recovery (DR) as a service, today announced that Miles & Stockbridge, an AmLaw 200 firm with 500 employees in six East Coast locations, is saving more than 40% on data storage costs with ClearSky. In addition, Miles & Stockbridge was able to get twice the capacity of its legacy NAS at a fraction of the cost.

The amount of data Miles & Stockbridge has to manage is constantly growing, and a single new case can bring in multiple terabytes of data that needs to be stored and protected in a manner that would satisfy the requirements for its ISO certification. Before ClearSky, the firm was using a network-attached storage (NAS) solution and backing up to tape, which could be time consuming and costly.

Kenneth Adams, CIO of Miles & Stockbridge, was initially interested in ClearSky’s ability to provide primary data storage, backup and DR as a single service.

“When we met ClearSky, we realized that maybe we wouldn’t need to back up anymore,” said Ken Adams, CIO at Miles & Stockbridge. “With ClearSky, data is stored in multiple locations — more than we had with our previous backup solution — and recovery is much faster.”

Once its data was in the ClearSky service, the firm was able to decommission 90 TB of storage that it had provisioned for data protection. In addition, IT staff no longer had to babysit the data protection process, because in ClearSky, it takes place automatically without affecting production performance. 

The firm is also enjoying benefits on the storage side. Miles & Stockbridge had already been taking advantage of the cloud for storage, but with ClearSky’s edge-based service, the firm was able to improve performance. With ClearSky, hot data is cached on-prem, and both hot and warm data are cached at the edge, where it’s accessible at sub-millisecond latency. 

“We get primary storage at an offsite location with built-in backup and disaster recovery, so we no longer require a separate process to copy, replicate, store and recover data,” Adams said. “And because it’s a fully-managed hybrid cloud service, we don’t have to own or maintain hardware to store that data. Finally it's elastic, so we can use whatever capacity we need and pay only for what we use.”

“The legal industry has very specific storage and data security needs, which traditional systems can’t meet affordably or efficiently,” said Ellen Rubin, CEO of ClearSky Data. “With ClearSky, legal services firms can cut their total cost of storage, improve storage performance and get RPOs and RTOs measured in minutes without having to spend endless amounts of time managing their storage environments. Innovative firms like Miles & Stockbridge have recognized this opportunity and are leading the way and transforming how other firms can now approach storage.”