Smith Anderson Enhances Technology Platform
Smith, Anderson, Blount, Dorsett, Mitchell & Jernigan, L.L.P., has further enhanced its technology platform in order to better serve its clients. The Firm recently installed a network storage management product that makes legal documents more accessible and protects the Firm from network failures. This allows the Firm’s lawyers and staff to have quick, reliable access to all legal documents, increasing productivity and improving and protecting the work product for clients.
The Firm installed EMC’s Celerra NS600G network-attached storage (NAS) gateway, allowing Smith Anderson to consolidate and optimize its storage-area network (SAN) and NAS storage in a single, highly available, easily managed networked storage system. EMC Corporation is an acknowledged market leader in information storage and management. The Firm integrated the Celerra NS600G gateway with an EMC CLARiiON® CX storage area network (SAN) to provide consolidated storage to Windows 2000 servers running critical applications, such as Elite time and billing, iManage document management and Exchange email. As a result, Smith Anderson is able to flexibly leverage its existing storage investment to maximize availability of information.
Lorie Beam, Director of Information Technology for Smith Anderson said, “As a law firm with nearly 100 attorneys, we cannot afford even an hour of downtime. The EMC solution’s advanced reliability and excellent performance not only provides better protection against sudden problems, but also allows us to retrieve archived data much more quickly than before. We’re confident our documents are safe and accessible when we need them.”
According to Gail Finch, Smith Anderson’s Network Manager, “We receive automatic notification of events and failures, centrally manage how disk drives are set up and can easily monitor changes in storage capacity. The EMC software automatically resolves a lot of issues, such as the need to rebalance SAN traffic across our fibre ports.”
Smith Anderson’s SAN product is only part of the Firm’s total technology solution. Smith Anderson has advanced its technology in recent years to allow collaboration and information sharing, such as virtual private networks, wireless email, and client-focused extranets, enabling lawyers to work closely with clients while working in the office or remotely.
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