Cybernetics Review

Henderson Franklin Starnes & Holt

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"I chose Cybernetics mainly for the price, performance and reliability."

Founded in 1924, Henderson Franklin Starnes & Holt is headquartered in Fort Myers, Florida, with offices in Sanibel and Bonita Springs. As one of the oldest and largest law firms between Tampa and Miami, they provide their clients with highly personalized service from over 55 experienced attorneys in a wide range of legal areas.

In 2013, to meet the company's growing data storage and performance demands, Darren Wallace the firm's Director of Information Technology, began a review of their systems architecture. The firm needed a solution that was fast, reliable, expandable - and one that provided uninterrupted access to data for Henderson Franklin attorneys and administrative staff.

Henderson Franklin had already been relying on Cybernetics equipment for years. Once their needs were identified, the firm narrowed their choices to newer, more advanced solutions offered by Dell, EMC and Cybernetics. In the end, Wallace once again turned to Cybernetics. "I was pleasantly surprised with the performance when I bought the first two SAN appliances. When I decided to upgrade I bought two more."

The current IT infrastructure at Henderson Franklin consists of 9 servers and 33 virtual servers, and more is expected. To support this, the configuration from Cybernetics has all the firm's data residing on solid state drives within SANs that are actually faster than the SSDs. If additional storage capacity or performance is needed, the Cybernetics systems' modular design is easy to upgrade in place without downtime. The highly-redundant SANs provide exceptional reliability with no single point of failure, an important consideration in ensuring round-the-clock availability.

"I chose Cybernetics because I was able to get better cache and IOPS (i.e. performance) as well as redundancy than Dell and EMC,” said Wallace. “Plus, the pricing blew the others away. The network vendor couldn’t believe we were getting what we received for the price.”

Henderson Franklin redeployed the original SANs at an off-site location to mirror their data using replication. To provide fast disk-to-disk backups, they added a Cybernetics Virtual Tape Library (VTL). The VTL then automatically moves their backups to a Cybernetics tape library for long-term archiving.

Summarizing the reasons for his decision, Wallace said "I chose Cybernetics mainly for the price, performance and reliability." Wallace found installation and setup to be easy, and Cybernetics' support was very knowledgeable, professional and helpful throughout the process.

When asked what he would say to someone else considering Cybernetics, Wallace didn't hesitate: "I am very happy with the performance; you will get a really good quality product at a very competitive price, and personalized support."

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