Clutch Group provides legal services and analyzes large volumes of data to support its clients. It needed a solution to provide faster response times of under 1 second to meet client requirements. Its existing storage systems had response times of up to 20 seconds. Clutch implemented the EMC XtremIO all-flash array, which reduced response times to less than 1 millisecond. This enabled Clutch to support a new VDI deployment without impacting its databases or adding cost. It also accelerated database operations, allowing Clutch to develop new services. The XtremIO solution provided scalable performance and capacity to support Clutch's continued growth.

1. CLUTCH GROUP
XtremIO All-Flash Array redefines paradigms in
the legal services marketplace
OVERVIEW
Clutch Group provides litigation, compliance, and legal services to major Fortune
500 companies in sectors with large legal exposure (Finance, Life Sciences, Natural
Resources, etc.). By using purpose-built technology solutions to extract deep
insights from large data volumes, the company transformed its business approach
of helping client firms make better legal decisions.
Clutch Group recognizes that it’s in the data business. “Our clients aren’t as
concerned with the underlying storage,” says Information Solutions Architect KJ
Stillabower. “What they know is that everything always works. When we had our
multi-terabyte databases on existing systems, clients sometimes had to wait up to
20 seconds for a response. To us, that was unacceptable. We actively looked for
ways to enable their requirements, no matter how challenging they were. So, in
essence, XtremIO allows us to do seemingly impossible things.”
EMC helps Clutch Group manage all this data cost-effectively and with near
instantaneous responsiveness. Clutch Group’s current environment is a tightly
integrated EMC storage solution made up of VPLEX and RecoverPoint for high-
availability requirements, as well as VNX and Isilon arrays. The XtremIO All-Flash
Array was originally intended to be used for the SQL database workloads. Once in
production, Clutch found the performance gains so significant that the company
decided to find other ways to take advantage of XtremIO’s linear and consistent
performance improvements. Clutch began to leverage the same array for a new
VDI project, which was previously unachievable without the agility of XtremIO.
The feedback on XtremIO’s ability to provide better user experience and response
times is so positive, in fact, that Clutch employs a “flash first” strategy for all of its
block data workloads. XtremIO has enabled Clutch Group to build its competitive
advantage in the legal services marketplace by helping to ensure that the stringent
requirements of the company’s blue-chip client base are completely satisfied
CHALLENGES
Stillabower is part of Clutch Group’s IT shop, and he knows all about the need for
efficient storage. “In only a matter of days after launching our eDiscovery
business, we landed a contract for a major matter,” he recalls. “That contract
meant processing about 20TB of data and generating nearly 4TB of SQL data.” It’s
a nice problem for any business to have. But with little time to react, Stillabower
says, “Time to market was crucial for Clutch to meet the demands of our legal
customers and integrate eDiscovery as part of our business strategy and service
offerings. We needed to figure out right away how to scale our environment.”
ESSENTIALS
Industry
Litigation, Compliance, and Legal Services
Company Size
Approximately 500 employees worldwide
Business Challenges
 Need to provide clients with more
meaningful business insights, in real time,
extracted from large volumes of data to
support worldwide legal services business
 Find a solution with split-second response
times to meet top-tier corporate clientele
SLA requirements
 New data requirements made previous
storage systems limited and bound by
architecture
 Significantly enhance SQL Server
performance
Solution
Mission-critical SQL Server Online
Transaction Processing (OLTP) database on
EMC XtremIO
Results
 Achieved less than 1 ms latency for OLTP
environment

2. The need for an agile infrastructure was crucial to Clutch Group’s opportunity to
grow from a legal staffing business and expand into areas of litigation and
investigation, compliance, and risk services. With XtremIO’s ability to help Clutch
Group analyze large volumes of data fast, they are now able to streamline the e-
discovery process, enhance their early insights, and create confident and compliant
disclosure processes. Clutch Group was recently named by Nelson Hall as a leader
in LPO vendor evaluation for their work in legal cost reduction, legal process
reengineering, risk management, and contract standardization. Clutch Group is
ranked highest among innovators in their industry for helping their customers drive
efficiency in their e-discovery practices.
To enable a complete solution, Clutch relied on the Professional Service assistance
of EMC’s partner IP Data Systems. The IP Data Systems team not only provided
the onsite configuration services to install the environment, but remained involved
with support and engineering assistance in addition to stewarding Clutch Group
throughout the process. Clutch Group continuously acknowledged all of IP Data
System’s effort during this effort.
SOLUTION
Embarking on this new opportunity required thorough analysis of all the major All-
Flash Arrays in the industry. Stillabower built his criteria with a clear success
measure: database performance. “With our existing systems, I was pushing two
days to do a full rebuild of all of my database indexes,” he recalls. “Now, even
though my databases have grown significantly since deploying XtremIO, I can
rebuild all the indexes in about two hours. Degraded indexes were creating
performance issues in the middle of the work day.” Huge business impacts were
realized, as Clutch Group is now able to mitigate performance impact during index
rebuilds and provide greater database availability to their users.
Clutch Group had first considered several different storage options. “We actually
ran a proof of concept on several other competitive products,” Stillabower says.
“We found that some vendors had reliability issues, some just could not scale to
our performance requirements, and some were far too expensive for the capacities
we needed. While all offered a very fast solution up front, most of the providers
couldn’t scale from 250k IOPs to 500k IOPs the way that XtremIO can. By choosing
XtremIO we don’t need a complicated data layout like we used to. Nobody
provided the performance and capacity scalability that EMC XtremIO
demonstrated. Additionally, the holistic solution that EMC offered was unmatched
by other vendors, giving us a tightly-integrated plan for our primary environment
and disaster recovery site.” While other All-Flash Array competitors fell short,
XtremIO and EMC’s comprehensive solution was able to address the short-term
and long-term requirements of the business.
“XtremIO allows us to scale performance and capacity
simultaneously. With any other array, you buy two controllers
and you don’t have the additive capacity. It’s only with XtremIO
that you get more capacity, throughput, and I/O. If you are
concerned with performance, here’s a really big hammer.”
KJ Stillabower, Information Solutions Architect Clutch Group
Today all block-based data resides on XtremIO, while the file-based data goes on
the company’s Isilon clusters. “We can also run many secondary applications and
processes on XtremIO, because the deduplication makes it so cost-effective,” notes
Stillabower. “This includes support applications used for processing and formatting,
Results (continued)
 Significant SQL Server performance
improvement, coupled with XtremIO’s
mixed workload capabilities, enabled the
customer to support a new VDI
deployment without impacting the SQL
environment or adding cost. Database
rebuild times decreased dramatically (from
2 days to as little as two hours),
accelerating Clutch Group’s mean time to
resolve issues and mitigate exposure of
critical database workloads
 Accelerated database operations
translates into the ability to spend more
time delivering business insight and
developing new services to help increase
Clutch Group client revenues
 Delivers high-performance solution with
features such as thin provisioning,
snapshotting, and in-line deduplication that
provide scale for the overall environment
 Significantly improved quality of service
has made it possible to roll VDI out to
external clients and improve user
experience, transforming Clutch Group’s
ability to bring on new customers, offer
new products, and satisfy existing clients
to a greater degree

3. as well as tier-two services and development environments. Even performance-
insensitive applications, down to the time server, are on XtremIO. Essentially
anything that is not a large-scale file or backup archive is on XtremIO, and we
have achieved less than 1 ms latency in this environment.” This represents an
improvement of 1,000% in baseline response time over the previous solution. More
importantly, the peak response times are still less than 2 ms, a more than
15,000% improvement over the previous solution.
XtremIO delivers critical business benefits that were originally unforeseen,
according to Stillabower. “We made our business use case around SQL, but after
we did the SQL fix, we realized that we needed a virtual desktop infrastructure,” he
says. “We were able to leverage XtremIO for VDI and not disrupt the SQL
workload. XtremIO just handles it. What’s great is that it allows us to do disposable
machines, which would typically have fairly high overhead. We are rebuilding every
time someone logs in. We want everyone to have a new machine every time to
provide consistency and help enforce our change management and security
policies. It’s something we would not have been willing to try in the past, especially
with our production database on the same device. With XtremIO, we are able to
rebuild 200 desktop images every day.” With 4-5x the performance of Clutch
Group’s previous environment, they are now able to create new business services
for their internal and external clients in a more cost-effective manner.
Stillabower adds that the enhancement relative to terminal services has opened up
new business opportunities. “The improvement has been so overwhelming that we
are now looking to expand beyond internal users,” he says. “Going forward, clients
on our flagship platform will also be able to use VDI to access our system, resulting
in a much cleaner experience.” XtremIO is enabling Clutch Group to redefine and
expand business opportunities for its clients. This has directly translated to
increased revenues for Clutch Group while driving disruptive value for their
customers by reducing the total cost per I/O and storage over time.
WHY ARCHITECTURE MATTERS
Ease of management is one of Stillabower’s highest priorities. “That’s a major
advantage of XtremIO,” he says. “Our technology team has to be lean, agile, and
efficient as our infrastructure team manages three-quarters of a petabyte of data
globally. It would be difficult for us to manage that much data with our current
staff using other solutions we tested, so the XtremIO All-Flash Array is ideal for us.
I don’t have to worry about tuning, pools, or about having the right RAID levels
and spares. The integrated EMC system makes my life possible, forget easy.”
Stillabower places high value on the deduplication capabilities of XtremIO. “We
have a lot of virtual machines that are essentially the same thing,” he explains.
“They run single-threaded processes and monopolize an entire operating
environment. We just stand up one in a VM and spin off 30 of them, and that gives
us a 30-threaded operation. On other systems that could take 30 times the disk
space, but when I put it on XtremIO, now I’m back down to near one.”
Deduplication enables the company to logically plan storage capacity at massive
scale and draw greater efficiency from each I/O operation.
“Early on we were trying to figure out our disaster recovery strategy,” says
Stillabower. “We’re focused on being very efficient with our time. Because XtremIO
allows us to do snapshots, we can move our disaster recovery strategy down the
application stack to a layer that requires a lot less management. Snapshots allow
us to do change verification quickly, and have a faster time to redeploy a cloned
virtual machine.” XtremIO snapshots are metadata-efficient, with flexibility and
high performance; globally in the array, metadata is never copied or bloated in
capacity to use writable snaps. Continues Stillabower,

4. “I just set up a profile, and I’ve got my in-time snapshot if I need to go back to it.
Married with our replication structure enabled by VPLEX and RecoverPoint, this
gives us array-level, point-in-time recovery without the need for costly backup
software.”
Having the ability to take multiple snaps of the database environment not only
improves protection, but also enables Clutch to aggregate and correlate more data
faster; the company was not able to do this with its existing infrastructure. Clutch
can now use snapshots to test new ways to deliver business services to its clients,
without the additional investment of time and money that this would have
previously required. The opportunities for business acceleration are exponential by
leveraging XtremIO’s data services.
Clutch has just begun to realize how the XtremIO X-brick performance scales
consistently and linearly over time. “The best part about XtremIO for us is the
fixed latency and near linear scalability,” Stillabower continues. “When your latency
never varies, whether you’re throwing 1000 IOPS or 100,000 IOPS at it—baseline
IOPS at Clutch Group ranges between 10,000 and 15,000, spiking to 50,000 to
75,000 in the middle of the day—you get amazing performance. When you start
talking to people who run other arrays, they’re always worried about load, where
things are sitting, and what type of RAID it’s on, because they have to manage the
IOPS capacity of the underlying disk. Because XtremIO does such a great job of
leveraging the flash, it can maintain a latency that is so low as to be virtually
irrelevant to the storage.”
He adds that the differentiator to other All-Flash-Arrays is that the array IO
performance scales in an almost linear fashion and is not limited by the same
controllers originally purchased. “XtremIO allows us to scale performance and
capacity simultaneously. With every other array, you buy two controllers and you
don’t have additive capacity. It’s only with XtremIO that you get more capacity,
throughput, and I/O. This makes it possible for us to plan for future growth without
expensive forklift replacements.”
IMPOSSIBLE? POSSIBLE WITH XTREMIO
In summary, Stillabower points again to all the ways XtremIO improves
performance as the key differentiators of XtremIO at Clutch Group. “I think the
thing it helps us with more than anything is that the performance helps keep our
licensing costs low,” he says. Clutch Group has come to trust the linear scalability
that the XtremIO X-brick delivers. “XtremIO drives up my utilization rates and
improves the performance of all my VMs and databases. Without it we would have
needed five or six times as many SQL Server hosts already. With XtremIO, we can
provide better service to clients at the value that they require.” Gone are the days
where customers like Clutch Group have to balance tradeoffs between performance
and capacity. XtremIO is giving Clutch Group the best of both worlds.
Stillabower concludes with a nod to the broader EMC portfolio. “There is a lot of
value in EMC’s family of products, specifically in the way XtremIO complements
other offerings and works symbiotically with them,” he concludes. “For true
efficiency, it makes sense to use the right tool for the job. For us that’s XtremIO,
Isilon, VPLEX, RecoverPoint, and VNX—having all those components that make the
whole stack work is extremely valuable for us.” As the company helps solve
complex problems for companies in the most litigious industries in the world, EMC’s
powerful storage portfolio helps Clutch Group to be the best in its business.

5. EMC
2
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are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other
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and other jurisdictions. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective
owners. © Copyright 2014 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 12/14
EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information
is subject to change without notice.
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