Largest Louisiana Law Firm Details Success with XOsoft's High Availability Business Continuity Solution for Exchange
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Jones Walker Replaced Previous Replication Solution With XOsoft's WANSyncHA; Ensuring Maximum Server and Application Uptime
CIO at Jones Walker Presents His Business Continuity Best Practices at LegalTech in NYC
WALTHAM, Mass., Jan. 30 -- XOsoft, a leading provider of continuous application availability solutions, is proud to announce that it has provided its critical, High Availability business continuity solution, WANSyncHA, to Jones Walker, the largest law firm in Louisiana with offices in Baton Rouge, Lafayette and New Orleans. With WANSyncHA, Jones Walker completed a successful 'failback' during Hurricane Katrina and Rita to its high availability servers and remote replica site; providing attorneys, staff and clients continuous communication and allowing attorneys the ability to retrieve vital documents quickly.
As one of the South's largest and most diverse firms, Jones Walker must provide immediate client assistance, ensure its data is highly available, and guarantee that clients have access to attorneys and legal staff at all times. With last year's hurricane season aggressively attacking the Southeast U.S., Jones Walker emphasized the need for solutions that would cut the amount of downtime, and provide continuous, uninterrupted access to business applications and information resources. The potential revenue loss that could be associated with a potential outage is tremendous, making the importance of uptime equal to its bottom-line.
With its primary set of servers located at its New Orleans office, Ken Orgeron, CIO at Jones Walker had to make preparations to ensure the Firm's data and critical applications could be completely recoverable. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, Orgeron instructed his team to conduct a test 'failover' to their High Availability Servers. Using NSI Software's High Availability solution, the 'failover' was problematic and took nearly eight hours, proving to be a long and laborious process at a very stressful time.
"A law firm doesn't make gadgets or anything tangible; our product is the legal advice of our attorneys, the written word, and the accessibility of our legal teams is critical -- especially during a hurricane or natural disaster," said Orgeron. "We felt we had to replace NSI's software, not because it didn't work, but just because it was too time consuming. With documentation that was several hundred pages long, eight hours of actual 'failover' time -- during a 'real-world' hurricane situation -- is alarming."
To provide a higher level of service for its sophisticated clientele, Orgeron replaced the NSI solution, with XOsoft's WANSyncHA to protect its corporate Exchange servers WANSyncHA delivered seamless service availability through application-aware, automatic failover capabilities and maintained identical replicas of its Exchange servers through continuous real-time replication. With the approach of Hurricane Rita, Jones Walker used WANSyncHA to replicate four Microsoft Exchange servers to their Hot Site at the LexisNexis data center in Miamisburg, Ohio. When the firm returned to New Orleans using WANSyncHA, the recovery to the production Exchange servers took minutes in contrast to the eight hours it took to 'failover'; enabling immediate, uninterrupted post-Katrina communications.
Orgeron emphasized the importance of its Exchange servers by further explaining, "Following Katrina and Rita, many of our clients were e-mailing our attorneys looking for legal assistance and disaster recovery advice, and were able to reach them immediately; which was key to maintaining confidence in our law firm and the ability to handle their matters in an emergency.
"When disaster strikes and critical servers go down, just having backups or standby replicas may not be enough," said Gil Rapaport, EVP, Marketing and Strategy, XOsoft. "Being able to overcome disasters quickly -- to allow applications to failover to replicas instantaneously and provide organizations like Jones Walker with true business continuity and continuous application availability is our primary goal."
For more information specific to Jones Walker's Disaster Recovery solution, Ken Orgeron is presenting on Tuesday, January 31, at 1:30pm EST at LegalTech, the largest and most important legal technology show, at the Hilton New York Hotel. Orgeron's presentation is part of the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery track, where he will discuss in detail how his firm was able to sustain business and client communication during the 2005 hurricane season. For details, visit: http://almevents.com/r5/cob_page.asp?category_code=ltech.
About Jones Walker
Jones Walker, with over 210 attorneys, provides a full range of legal services to a sophisticated national and international corporate client base through offices in Florida, Louisiana, Texas and Washington D.C. For more information, please visit http://www.joneswalker.com/.
About XOsoft
XOsoft's continuous application and information availability solutions keep enterprises working. The company's patented software platforms significantly lower the risks of decreased productivity and lost revenue by minimizing application downtime and ensuring that the most up-to-date information is available throughout the enterprise. Many of the world's largest corporations and government agencies have chosen XOsoft to ensure uninterrupted access to their most valuable information assets. For more information, please visit http://www.xosoft.com/.
Press Contacts:
Chris Foster
XOsoft Press Office
212-715-1691
XOsoftPR@ruderfinn.com
CONTACT: Chris Foster, XOsoft Press Office, +1-212-715-1691, XOsoftPR@ruderfinn.com
Web site: http://www.xosoft.com/
http://www.joneswalker.com/
http://almevents.com/r5/cob_page.asp?category_code=ltech
