Lloyd Gosselink Rochelle & Townsend Ensure Reliable, Constant E-mail Services with AppAssure Software
Challenge: Easy-to-use solution to protect Exchange data against a server outage or database corruption
Solution: AppAssure’s backup and disaster recovery solution
Results: Ability to ensure reliable, constant email services
Background
Lloyd Gosselink Rochelle & Townsend, PC concentrates in the areas environmental, regulatory, administrative, and utility law, as well as government relations, litigation, and transactions. Like any law frm, e-mail is a central application and protecting the e-mail system is a central function of information services. David Henninger, Manager of Information Services and Rick Larrea, Network Administrator have taken many steps to ensure reliable, constant e-mail services. One of the most important was implementing AppAssure.
E-mail in a legal environment
Lloyd Gosselink hasn’t suffered an e-mail outage in nine years. That’s a trend that David Henninger, the firm’s Manager of Information Services, and Rick Larrea, Network Administration, would like to continue.
Like all law firms, Lloyd Gosselink is immensely reliant on e-mail. “E-mail is a vital part of our business,” explains Henninger. “We can do without a lot of things but we can’t do without e-mail.” Communications with clients happen over e-mail. Meetings and schedules are set. Documents are exchanged. Many legal documents, like flings, are time-sensitive. Missing a deadline can have a big, negative impact on a client’s business. And, when a law firm damages a client’s business it can be considered malpractice.
An important component of their e-mail protection process is creating redundancy for the application and associated data. “With most applications we have multiple layers of redundancy but we didn’t have that for Exchange,” reports Larrea. While he was using a tape and disk back up solution, he was concerned about recovering from a server outage or database corruption.
Establishing redundancy
Henninger points out that “it’s important to be able to get back to where we were before an outage occurred.” That wasn’t possible with tape backups that were created too infrequently to provide a current restore. He and Larrea chose AppAssure so they could easily take advantage of frequent snapshots of their Exchange environment.
Larrea found AppAssure “very straightforward.” He put it through the paces during an evaluation in the firm’s test environment explaining “I like to be able to kick the tires knowing that nothing will blow up.” AppAssure’s technical support team was “really good, very knowledgeable” when Larrea called with a few questions but, in general, he found AppAssure to be easy to use and put it into production.
AppAssure takes snapshots three times a day – an interval that will return users to a very current state should an outage occur while requiring only a minimum of disk space on the AppAssure server. And AppAssure only requires the barest minimum of management. “I just check it once or twice a week,” says Larrea. “I get an e-mail if there’s a problem and AppAssure checks to make sure that the Exchange database doesn’t contain corrupt data.”
While Larrea hasn’t had to use AppAssure to recover from an outage he has used it to restore important Exchange items. “One of our executives got a Blackberry and lost all his contacts. With AppAssure, we were able to easily get them back.”
Looking ahead
Henninger and Larrea know that they AppAssure will help them recover from an outage if one should ever occur and they’re not worried that the staff at Lloyd Gosselink would panic if e-mail was unavailable for a little while. “We’ve built a lot of good will with the team here,” says Henninger. “They know that we’re using products like AppAssure and thinking about redundancy and application safety.”
Larrea has yet to test AppAssure on bare metal restore but that’s on his list of things to do. He’s just beginning to test the software’s ability to push data to a virtual server and sees that as part of AppAssure’s future at Lloyd Gosselink.
Henninger, who is watching out for the business end of Lloyd Gosselink’s IT infrastructure, calls AppAssure “an application that you buy but hope you never need to use. It does what we need it to do. It’s there working, it’s not intrusive, it’s not requiring a lot of attention. It’s affordable peace of mind.”
About Lloyd Gosselink Rochelle & Townsend
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Since being founded as one of the first environmental law firms in Texas, Lloyd Gosselink has evolved to develop new areas of expertise to meet our clients’ changing and growing demands. The Firm was founded on the principle that teamwork should prevail by drawing on the talents of all levels of professional and support staff to meet our clients’ needs. The result is a team-oriented culture that sets Lloyd Gosselink apart in the legal community and has resulted in the Firm being selected in 2009 as one of the Best Places to Work in Austin.
