George Jon & Associates helps customers collect legal data from paper files and hard drives. Credit: Getty Images
For George Jon & Associates, an IT consulting firm in Chicago, the challenge is to help customers avoid downtime as they host millions of legal files. Founded in 1997, George Jon implements fault-tolerant data environments for its legal clients.
About 80 to 90 percent of George Jon’s customers are service bureaus that collect legal data from a company’s paper files and hard drives and host the processing and reviewing of data, totaling up to 2 to 3 petabytes. The customers store e-discovery documents called natives, which consist of files that include JPEGs, TIFFs and Microsoft Outlook data files.
“A company goes in and does the collections and the forensics, and all the data that’s in the directories we’re dealing with are Outlook PST files, scanned images, basically anything and everything you can find in a corporation, whether it’s paper or data on drives, so it could be a mix of anything,” George Nedwick, owner and principal architect for George Jon, told Tech Page One. “Most of it is images that are being reviewed.”
Complete solution, modular design
George Jon deploys a modular design that allows the consulting firm to meet the needs of both small and large customers, said Dan McConnell, Dell’s executive director of product management.
George Jon & Associates turned to Dell’s EqualLogic PS Series modular storage platform for a starting point to scale its infrastructure.
“Elements of EqualLogic and its modular scalability are clearly in line with their business model,” McConnell told Tech Page One.
Along with hardware and software from Dell, George Jon’s platform includes VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. SRM is a disaster-recovery application with a hyper-converged infrastructure that offers automated orchestration and testing of recovery plans for virtualized applications.
“Our clients have 25-node five or six clusters of SQL, and these servers are using between 3 and 6 terabytes of data each, so we definitely maximize the full potential of Dell hardware,” said Nedwick.
George Jon’s end-to-end Dell solution includes SonicWall network security, Force10 switches, PowerEdge servers and EqualLogic storage hardware.
“Keeping all of the components under a Dell umbrella for support reasons just makes more sense,” said Dustin Allen, director of technical support for George Jon, during a presentation at VMworld 2014 called “Size Does Matter: Performance, Uptime, Growth and You.”
By using Dell’s SecureWorks platform, George Jon was able to add low-latency storage networking and intrusion detection at both the host layer and a networking layer.
“We have SecureWorks monitoring the firewalls as well as each individual operating system and the logs on those devices, so if an outbreak occurs, then SecureWorks notifies us and allows us to respond appropriately,” said Allen.
Keeping a redundant backup plan
At George Jon, all switches, network interface controllers (NICs) and servers have a built-in redundancy. Because lawyers need access to data at all hours of the night, a robust backup infrastructure is essential, and EqualLogic frees the company from worrying about downtime or restructuring.
“When dealing with storage, we have to have high-performance storage but also high capacity,” said Allen. “We’ve got lots of different users in these systems that require 24/7 access as the trial date approaches, for example.”
Avoiding customer downtime and maintaining continuity
George Jon’s customers need a high-capacity database that’s reliable so they can perform searches at a moment’s notice to track down critical information, Allen noted.
Scaling without downtime is critical, according to Allen. “We can’t have latency, and we can’t have any blocking whatsoever on the SAN [storage area network] side,” he said.
By using Dell AppAssure, George Jon was able to reduce the amount of time to back up several terabytes from a month to two or three days.
Check out the video below to learn more about trends in storage and virtualization from McConnell and Nedwick and how George Jon & Associates maintains uptime for millions of files.
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Brian T. Horowitz has been a technology journalist since 1996 and has contributed to numerous publications, including Computer Shopper, CruxialCIO, eWEEK, Fast Company, NYSE magazine, ScientificAmerican.com and USA Weekend. He holds a B.A. from Hofstra University and is based in New York.
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The post Video: Consulting firm helps lawyers maintain IT uptime – Tech Page One appeared first on Evan Vitale Consulting Blog.
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