Highly available storage and compute
As a growing business, Howard Kennedy sought an IT partner that could help deliver huge digital transformation projects. Based in London, the law firm provides a variety of legal services, from financial services to real estate, and works with entrepreneurial businesses, funders and individuals. Having completed two mergers since 2013, and with a 2020 vision of growing to £100million organisation, Howard Kennedy was looking to future-proof its IT systems to ensure the underlying infrastructure had the capacity and performance capabilities to support organic growth and further acquisitions.
Challenge
The firm’s main aim was to replace its ageing storage systems, in both its primary and secondary data centres, with next generation, fully redundant and highly performant technology. The organisation’s existing NetApp storage arrays were coming to the end of their support cycle but due to rising support costs, it was impractical to extend this support any further.
Solution
Proact carried out a performance review of Howard Kennedy’s existing systems to establish a clear idea of capacity, bandwidth and IOPS requirements. The long-term strategy, devised by Proact, utilised a feature rich solution which offered the lowest risk and most cost effective route to achieve Howard Kennedy’s goals. This solution included Proact’s Storage as a Service which allowed storage and compute to become an “off balance” expense, while also ensuring that peak performance was being obtained by systems.
“It’s a pleasure to work with Proact. These projects have significantly improved our IT capacity and performance, ensuring the underlying infrastructure supports our 2020 vision of growth via acquisitions, with a fixed monthly cost and guaranteed cost per GB for any expansion.”
