Hibberts Solicitors looks to the future with Quorum’s simple and effective DR

The Challenge

The majority of the firm’s IT infrastructure, which includes Exchange, SQL databases, file servers, web filtering and email filtering, was based at its head office in Cheshire. All these critical services needed to be maintained and made available to staff and clients.

Hibberts previously relied on a tape and disk backup solution with a dedicated server that backed up to disk and tape every night but administration and management was time consuming. In addition, the recovery time from tape in the event of physical failure could be anything from 24 to 48 hours.

With most of the infrastructure concentrated at its head office, the firm was aware of its reliance on a single location.

“We needed to take the onus off one site,” said Hibberts IT manager Chris Boundy. As the person responsible for the firm’s infrastructure, he was also looking for a system that could work in the background without him having to worry about it. “I didn’t want to be spending a lot of time on things that need constant supervision and work,” Boundy explains. “I was looking for something that would manage itself, didn’t need a lot of technical input or management and would give me the reliability and peace of mind that I could install it and power it up with minimal configuration.”

Solution

While researching the market, Hibberts came upon Quorum. Boundy contacted the vendor to test the system in his IT environment. During due diligence testing, it quickly became apparent Quorum’s ease of use set it apart from other solutions on the market.

Boundy opted for two Quorum onQ appliances with a high availability device sited in its head office and another appliance as the DR server in a separate location.

The onQ devices keep up-to-date copies of all operating system, application and data files on the local and remote appliances. Unlike conventional backup products, they also keep ready-to-run “recovery nodes” standing by. If any protected servers fail, the recovery node can be started with a single click and have the business running again in minutes.

The entire process is automatic and doesn’t require any additional hardware or software. onQ’s incremental updates are extremely efficient, sending only the parts of any files that have changed, storing them in its repository for point-in-time file recovery and merging those changes into the recovery nodes. The updates are so efficient that businesses can keep months of snapshots that are as little as 15 minutes apart.

Installing and deploying the appliances was simple and straightforward. The onQ devices were pre-configured with details provided by Boundy and after a couple of two-hour training sessions, he was able to install and deploy the solution himself. “I plugged them in, powered them up and added the protected nodes. It was that simple,” he says.

The Benefits

The Quorum solution has helped to cut recovery time significantly for Hibberts from days with the older tape system to minutes. This represents an RTO reduction of 99.9%. With Quorum’s recovery nodes, it can take as little as two minutes to power up a server and get it going. Under the previous system, the recovery time could be as much as two days and the recovery data could be up to 24 hours old. With Quorum, back ups take place much more frequently, so any data recovered is much fresher than under the old tape-based system.


Quorum appealed to Hibberts because it was competitively priced, secure and user-friendly. Boundy has already used the onQs for file restores and to go back in time in a document’s history. Looking to the future he’s also exploring using the Quorum solution as a test and development environment. He explained: “At Hibberts we embrace innovation to benefit clients. Quorum fits with this motto by providing quick RTOs, protecting data and providing a snapshot of the whole system for testing.”

The solution is easy to use and manage, so if Boundy is on holiday or away from the office, other managers in the firm are able to use it by logging in and clicking a few buttons. “We didn’t want a highly technical solution,” Boundy explained. “If I’m not there, my colleagues in the office can do the job with the Quorum solution. That was a major decision factor for us.”

Summing up, Boundy said Quorum is “a fantastic tool for an IT manager. It makes my job a lot easier having it behind me.”