Testimonials
Case Study: Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP
""The law firm Munger,
Tolles & Olson (MTO) was founded more than 40 years ago. Today
there are approximately 180 MTO lawyers and 400 employees in
the two MTO offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. MTO practices
nationwide in areas including bankruptcy, corporate, environmental,
labor and employment, litigation, real estate, and tax law.
Known for trying "bet-the-company cases" and negotiating deals that shape the U.S. corporate landscape, the MTO lawyers work in an egalitarian environment and the firm's major decisions are made by consensus. MTO ranked first in the nation in 2008, 2009 and once again in 2010 on The American Lawyer's "A-List" based on four core professional values: success of overall practice/revenue per lawyer, pro-bono practice, associate satisfaction, and workplace diversity. http://www.mto.com/about/
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Business Challenges
Gathering and organizing facts, communicating with colleagues and clients, and preparing documents for trial are just a few of the information-rich activities that are fundamental to the practice of law. A 21-person IT team supports these and other business activities at MTO.
With a compound annual storage growth rate approaching 63 percent, storage had become a serious challenge, according to John Stambelos, IT Director at Munger, Tolles & Olson.
"Our search for a solution began with an in-depth analysis of our requirements: clearly we needed scalability," Stambelos said. "And there were many user complaints about the performance of our existing system and we needed to solve that."
"Ultimately our requirements document was very detailed," Stambelos said. "The three critical decision factors were high performance, scalability, and supporting resilient business continuity and disaster recovery objectives. We were looking for a storage solution that addressed these and still maintained our capital budget."
Strategic Solution
"When we vetted our requirements for high-capacity, high-quality storage, it became evident that NetApp was the solution that made the most sense for our organization for the long term," Stambelos said. "In turn, NetApp introduced us to Insight Integrated Systems, and we have not looked back since," Stambelos stated.
"Insight Integrated Systems, the NetApp Authorized Professional Service Partner, provided storage implementation, data migration, and data replication services and they were critical in helping drive the architecture," Stambelos stated.
"The full solution includes one NetApp Network- Attached Storage (NAS) filer in our San Francisco and one in our Los Angeles office and NetApp SnapMirror software replicating data real-time on a block level basis between the facilities," Stambelos explained.
Stambelos emphasized that there were challenging aspects of the implementation that Insight Integrated Systems helped to resolve. One was the conversion time for close to 200 million files. "We were concerned about being out of production for an unacceptable amount of time. Insight Integrated Systems found a third-party utility that cut the process down considerably-this is just one example of their innovation and creative problem solving," he stated.
"The Insight Integrated Systems team was key to the success of this project: they helped define it; they took control of project management; and they drove the project even when we didn't," Stambelos said. "As is perhaps the case in many other organizations, our IT team is constantly asked to redirect our project focus. However, Insight Integrated Systems did not redirect their focus for one minute; they kept the project moving forward." "We have a support contract with NetApp, but sometimes we go directly to Insight Integrated Systems because they know our configuration, our business needs, and the NetApp products so well," Stambelos noted.
Benefits and Results
"The value of our experience with Insight Integrated Systems is really about the people we dealt with," Stambelos said. "The sales engineer who started working with us on the NetApp project continued throughout the entire engagement, and he continues to provide us with a high level of very strategic technical expertise."
"Insight Integrated Systems helped select the right systems to meet our budgetary needs and business requirements and provide the scalability that we needed," Stambelos stated. "The Insight Integrated Systems "Insight Integrated Systems has gone above and beyond what we would expect any vendor or VAR to do. Their team works hard to understand where our business is going and what things are important to us. To this day, Insight Integrated Systems continues to provide unparalleled support and high-quality technical expertise to MTO." - John Stambelos, IT Director, Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP team's design and engineering, technical support, and their ability to navigate through some of the NetApp complexities made the project go exceptionally well."
"Because of the technology and because of the engineering that Insight Integrated Systems provided, we can provision storage quickly and easily and our backup windows have shrunk substantially from days to hours," Stambelos said. "We've been able to hold the line on engineer headcount while maintaining high-quality storage and providing improved disaster recovery. And performance-related complaints are down."
"Insight Integrated Systems kept the project moving forward throughout the selection process, implementation and post-implementation. They did a tremendous job-always addressing our requirements with a focus on helping us serve the needs of our clients," Stambelos concluded
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