Releases

posted on 15 February 2008 04:43

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Brocade® a leader in data centre networking solutions that help enterprises connect and manage their information, today announced that Applied Discovery, a leading provider of electronic discovery services to top corporations and law firms, is better able to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for clients with complex and large discovery matters, including Fortune 100 companies in the financial, securities, and pharmaceutical sectors and AmLaw 100 law firms, by implementing a Brocade Storage Area Network (SAN).

The Brocade SAN has overcome space and power limitations and provides half a petabyte of Tier 1 storage used by the Seattle-based company to host electronically stored information used in litigation.

A business unit of LexisNexis, Applied Discovery also relies on high-speed Brocade SAN routers to link several facilities to its new data centre, a hosted site in Washington state. This approach helps the company rapidly migrate terabytes of data between the sites.

“Brocade solutions provide the performance, efficiencies, and form factor to maximise density constraints and minimise energy expenditures,” said Gary Oberg, vice president of IT and development, Applied Discovery. “Heat and power are big concerns for companies like ours that must maintain constantly growing volumes of data, and data centre space is very expensive. Brocade’s enterprise-class directors allow us to economise on space and electrical power while delivering industry-leading performance and scalability.”

Putting its clients first, Applied Discovery looked for new solutions to accommodate the company’s explosive growth to host more than 1000 client databases in over 50 SQL clusters within its data centre. With business continuing to expand, the company sought a best-of-breed solution that would allow for further scalability without expanding its footprint or consuming unnecessary power.

To meet its needs, Applied Discovery standardised on Brocade 48000 Directors for the SANs at all of its facilities. The directors can provide 4 or 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel speeds with up to 384 ports, delivering the port density and performance that the legal services provider required. Because of the compact form factor and much lower power consumption, the company also can place two Brocade 48000 Directors in a single rack, maximising data centre space.

In August 2007, Applied Discovery installed two Brocade 48000 Directors at its Washington state data centre, and the company plans to install additional platforms at its other sites. The firm also deployed two Brocade 7500 SAN Routers to provide high-speed FCIP connectivity, allowing it to consolidate data. The Brocade 7500 is the industry’s leading 4 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel routing switch. To simplify administration and management of the new high-speed infrastructure, Applied Discovery uses Brocade Fabric Manager.

“Brocade solutions are more compact and offer unsurpassed performance and scalability, while consuming a fraction of the power of our legacy devices,” concluded Oberg. “Brocade provides state-of-the-art data connectivity services that efficiently optimize our data centre resources. With Brocade solutions, Applied Discovery will continue to satisfy our clients and meet our SLAs.”

About Applied Discovery
Applied Discovery, Inc. has been partnering with the nation’s top corporations and law firms in navigating the complexities of e-discovery since 1998. The company combines cutting-edge technology with a knowledge of and respect for the legal considerations, time and financial constraints of many cases. Applied Discovery is ideally suited for large engagements, second request and matters with aggressive deadlines. Applied Discovery is based in Seattle with east coast headquarters in New York City and regional offices in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. LexisNexis acquired Applied Discovery in July 2003. More information can be found at http://www.applieddiscovery.com.