Accounting for Change at Mazars

Published 5th December 2008

Mazars, a leading business advisory and accounting firm, aims to be nothing short of technically excellent. This not only applies to its tax and accounting specialists, it is at the forefront of everything the organisation does.

It will come as no surprise therefore, that when it came to reviewing its existing IT infrastructure Mazars chose virtualisation specialists Intercept to help it meet the challenge of today’s business needs.

Independent, international and integrated
Mazars is one of Europe’s largest accounting firms, represented in over 46 countries worldwide. In the UK alone it has over 100 Partners and more than 1,100 staff based in its 17 offices. The company specialises in audit, accounting and tax and it boasts clients that include 17% of the FTSEurofirst 100, owner-managed and entrepreneurial businesses, the public sector and private individuals.

Mission Critical Data Storage
Jayson Dudley, Systems Manager at Mazars, stated: “Our IT department is responsible for ensuring that business critical data is rapidly accessible 24/7, through a highly effective business continuity solution.”

Mazars handles vital data on behalf of its clients. From spreadsheets to legal documents, from emails to letters both the applications and the information these generates have seen the data storage needs of the organisation growing at an exponential rate for many years.

This data not only needs to be stored in a highly cost effective manner but also in a way that will enable the Partners and their supporting teams to access that data in a fast and reliable way.

Jayson continued: “The mammoth task of ensuring that the IT infrastructure has enough capacity lies with my department. It therefore plays a critical role in ensuring that the business itself is best placed to service its customers in turn.”

Mazars data storage needs are growing at an astounding rate. With environmental protection gaining more and more attention, the company is handling an increasing amount of data at a time when energy efficiency and green IT is firmly on the agenda.

“What was needed was a data storage solution that was both scalable to our future needs, while being robust enough to ensure that the business would continue to operate in the event of an emergency no matter how serious,” he continued.

Another major challenge faced by Mazars is the distributed nature of its business. Individual offices are relatively autonomous, but it is essential that we share a common infrastructure given our international clients.

A High Availability SAN Solution
Mazars turned to virtual IT solutions specialists Intercept to help it address the data storage challenge it confronted.

Jayson continued: “Intercept immediately identified that we required a centralised storage area network (SAN) solution. We needed high speed access to 50 terabytes of raw storage. Intercept worked with us to design and build our SAN and to integrate several mission critical applications.”

To put 50 terabytes of storage into context - 1 terabyte of text printed on A4 would need 50,000 trees pulped and turned into paper. 50 terabytes is equivalent to five times the size of the entire print collection of The British Library!

Critically for Mazars the SANs needed to support mirroring, backup and restore, data archival and retrieval, data migration from one storage device to another, and the sharing of data among different servers in the network. In addition the solution had to centralise mission critical business applications including Sage, Advance, Viztopia and Microsoft Office.

Intercept recommended a virtualised SAN based on Dot Hill SAN net II, which is providing an effective and efficient data storage solution. The Dot Hill SAN net II 200 FC array is an ultra-compact, highly robust storage system that provides affordable, enterprise-class performance and management and configuration flexibility.

FalconStor IPStor Enterprise Edition was integrated into the new configuration to provide continuous data protection, mirroring, snapshot and data replication capability to enable a complete disaster recovery solution.

Fast, efficient and secure
Intercept had already implemented a virtual environment in Mazars data centre using Citrix and VMware to ensure that they were ready for this next step. The IT department can now centrally control applications, desktops and the server infrastructure.

Prior introducing the SAN, effective backup and restore of critical data could not be guaranteed, leaving data vulnerable. The existing infrastructure was also not keeping pace with the continued growth in demand, and the incumbent backup solution was not centralised so restoring data was taking too long.

“Our legacy systems were becoming ineffective. We realised we needed to deliver a new infrastructure,” continued Jayson.

Mazars is already seeing major improvements in business operations. User performance has improved dramatically now that data is readily accessible via the SAN. And for the IT department valuable IT time is no longer being diverted to day-to-day support issues. Freeing time for development and testing of new technologies and applications will further enhance IT performance.

The SAN, which is in a mirrored configuration, provides high availability not only speeding up access and retrieval times, but is also a highly resilient disaster recovery solution in the event of an emergency.

“Intercept has delivered a highly robust and scaleable SAN solution that will enable Mazars and their clients to benefit well into the future,” continued Jayson.

“Our accountants and business consultants demand near 100% availability. Intercept has ensured that their demanding performance requirements have been met. Next time we need help I know who to call,” concluded Jayson.

Industry
Auditing and accounting

Customer
Mazars

Business Challenge
• Improve data storage and retrieval
• Ineffective backup and restore
• Reduce business risk to continue business operations
• Reduce desktop management, support and maintenance costs
• Provide a reliable, high availability, high performance infrastructure
• Access multiple platforms from any desktop

Business Solution
• Citrix
• VMWare
• DotHill SAN net II
• FalconStor IPStor

Business Advantages
• Improve efficiency of data storage
• Reduce time and cost of server management
• Simplify storage management
• Enhance data protection and availability
• Enable virtualised server infrastructures
• Lowered IT costs for the desktop environment
• Improved access to a broad range of applications and operating systems
• Enhanced the user experience
• Provided a flexible, scalable platform to support future needs