High-Tech Law Firm Relies On InMage

High-tech law firm Fenwick & West LLP went shopping for a disaster recovery solution after geologists told them that their San Francisco and Silicon Valley offices could get hit hard by a 6.0 or higher earthquake in the region.

They started with “the big boys,” as Fenwick CTO Matt Kesner puts it — SunGard, IBM and AT&T.

They all wanted “seven figures” for their services, Kesner told Enterprise Storage Forum, and their enterprise focus assumed more in-house storage expertise than the 600-employee firm had. “They would say, ‘This is something your storage person can do,'” Kesner said. “Well, we don’t have a storage person. We probably never will.”

A competitor told them about InMage, a backup and disaster recovery start-up founded by Brocade co-founder Kumar Malavalli that came out of stealth mode this week, and the rest is history. Fenwick hired InMage within 10 days “for less than 10% of the average of what we were told by the big boys,” Kesner said.

“They seem to be serving a part of the market that no one else is, the small and medium-sized business market,” Kesner said. “We’re pleased, and we don’t become cheerleaders for anyone. They more than met our expectations.”

“Disaster recovery is talked about everywhere, but only really implemented in one percent of the IT world,” said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “InMage is destroying the excuses for all size shops, enabling everyone to protect themselves just like the really big guys.”

InMage this week announced availability of its InMage DR-Scout, modular appliance-based software aimed at providing multi-site disaster recovery solutions for mid-tier enterprises. The DR-Scout solution replicates data in any form — unstructured, structured, volume, file and application data — from a primary to a secondary site on wide area networks (WAN).

InMage claims its volume approach — compared to traditional file-based approaches — dramatically reduces risk of data loss and downtime.

DR-Scout analyzes the bandwidth needed to meet or exceed the service levels required for disaster recovery — recovery-point objective and recovery-time objective — and does it all with centralized management.

InMage has about a dozen customers so far, Malavalli told Enterprise Storage Forum, and the company plans to shift to a reseller model when it exceeds 20 customers.

“We have very good customer traction, and we are not sacrificing performance,” Malavalli said.

The average installation runs about $75,000, according to InMage president Anup Tirumala.

“We talked to a lot of customers, and came to a profound conclusion: Companies had a total lack of flexibility in deploying and managing their DR solutions,” Malavalli said. “InMage solves these immediate problems by providing a flexible, scalable and heterogeneous disaster recovery solution that allows them to proactively protect their data. DR-Scout offers our customers an adaptable, modular approach that doesn’t require a forklift upgrade or consume the entire IT budget.”

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