LDiscovery, LLC
About the Client
LDiscovery provides end-to-end legal and technology consulting services to AmLaw 200 firms, Fortune 500 corporations, and large government agencies. Established in 2005, LDiscovery has quickly grown into one of the largest national eDiscovery providers with offices in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco, as well as a London site.
Client Challenge
- In 2008 LDiscovery had already outgrown its own datacenter space at its McLean, VA headquarters. Not only was the company growing exponentially in size, but the infrastructure within their in-house facility was less than the enterprise-grade power, cooling, backup, and networking, that a leading provider of eDiscovery management solutions like LDiscovery requires.
- By 2008 LDiscovery found itself challenged by fast-paced organic growth in an unpredictable economic climate, escalating levels of technological advances, and complexity of the infrastructure that an “always on” 24x7x365 enterprise needs to rely on. Outsourcing their needs for data center capacity to colocation partners was deemed to be the best solution in order to allow LDiscovery to focus on its core competencies vs. building out and managing data centers. LDiscovery’s Vice President of Technology, Brian T. Wolfinger (CCE, CISO) solicited proposals from numerous providers proximate to the LDiscovery headquarters site.
CherryRoad Solution
- In the process of soliciting proposals, Wolfinger discovered HopOne, whose DCA2 data center is conveniently located in the heart of Tyson’s Corner, VA central business area. As one of several data centers across the country in the HopOne portfolio, DCA2 has the full range of power connections and backup, cooling, fire suppression and water leak detection, and multi-layer security to protect customer equipment and data, in addition to being a major PoP on the hopone.net coast-to-coast IP backbone and carrying a 100% uptime SLA. Wolfinger’s number one priority was to find a partner whose information security management and business continuity systems were certified and guaranteed for 100 percent uptime for power and connectivity.
- Wolfinger toured the HopOne datacenter and saw the Tier III design of infrastructure, including high availability measures such as diverse power feeds, high-capacity load support, N+1 cooling, and diesel generators that leave no single point of failure. He also saw the quadruple entrances of multiple telecommunications providers plus an option of managed bandwidth with performance optimized BGP routing across the highly redundant hopone.net coast-to-coast IP backbone. All of these factors complement each other to provide a high level of resiliency of facilities and connectivity and enable HopOne to deliver true 100 percent facility and network uptime.
- “While interacting and evaluating various service providers, we realized that the technology spark that we wanted in a partner who could help us grow was present in HopOne,” said Wolfinger. “We realized that the people who were interacting with us were great at technology, they understood our requirements, related it to what we needed and came up with the best possible solution based on our specific needs.”
Client Benefit
By choosing HopOne as a colocation and connectivity partner, LDiscovery was able to quickly achieve the flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness to effectively support the enterprise’s business plans. HopOne allows LDiscovery to scale as needed upon demand – practically instantly, in fact. The costs of security and data center technology are shared with the colocation partner while LDiscovery costs were further reduced by innovations in efficiency. Wolfinger characterizes the partnership as “a great relationship” and he recognizes that whenever they have had a technology problem, that HopOne has worked closely and relentlessly with LDiscovery to find and implement a solution.
For example, LDiscovery’s initial footprint consisted of five racks in the multi-tenant area of the DCA2 data center. Increasing levels of regulation made demands on how LDiscovery stored and managed their growing data. Within six months of partnering with HopOne, LDiscovery was in secure cabinets, and several years later LDiscovery moved to a highly secure, electromagnetic interference shielded private room dedicated exclusively to their needs, with dedicated and redundant AC, redundant power feeds, protected by redundant UPS systems and generators, and redundant high-capacity network uplinks. This dedicated autonomous suite now serves as LDiscovery’s private and highly secure data center, providing the space, power, and cooling that the advanced infrastructure running their mission-critical hardware, applications, and data requires without compromising on security and reliability.
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“HopOne as a true partner ensures high availability of IT infrastructure and 100 percent uptime of the LDiscovery service, that guarantees a consistent customer experience for a professional services organization. HopOne provides round-the-clock support, maintenance, and technical expertise to ensure fast turnaround times and improved performance levels, and ensures a robust and scalable IT infrastructure in support of LDiscovery’s expansion and growth plans”.