Same law applies whatever the environment
By Leslie Faughnan
William Fry Solicitors is one of Ireland’s top five law firms, with a staff of almost 380 – including more than 250 lawyers.
“In a professional firm like ours today, the systems are mission-critical,” said Michael Devitt, IT manager. Another early adopter of virtualisation, the firm has had a full-blown virtualised production environment for nearly four years.
It uses a combination of VMware and XenServer for application servers and succeeded in consolidating from35 physical servers to four. William Fry is a Citrix user and about 65 per cent of its staff are on server-based computing.
“We embarked on virtualisation in 2007 and took a phased approach to all aspects. It has all worked out very well, including our data storage on a HP Lefthand San with VM ware and current capacity of well over five terabytes, growing by the day,” Devitt said.
Of the 60 or so applications in use in William Fry, there have been a couple that do not yet work well in a virtualised environment, so” we still have a couple of servers to go’‘.
One of the areas where it deliberately took its time was Microsoft Exchange.
“This was big, mission critical and known to be tricky. So we researched the issues, took consultants’ advice and put our Exchange upgrade on test for several weeks. But it all worked well in the end.”
Other areas were very straightforward, notably SQL Server, while the Citrix environment migrated easily and came down from15 physical XenApp servers to five physical Xen Servers, running three XenApp servers on each.
“From the beginning, disaster recovery was a major consideration, and we are much happier and feel more secure with the sheer flexibility of a virtualised environment.”
Virtualisation was thoroughly mainstream at this stage, Devitt said, but in every implementation there would be design and other issues, while not all application vendors were yet fully on board.
“I believe that using experienced consultants is important, especially at the earliest stages, in getting the project designed and specced properly, so that you know exactly what’s going to hit. Once set up, there are few major management issues but it is certainly worthwhile investing in training for the key people.”
He said there were serious up-front costs, notably in beefier hardware and licensing, but the results were definitely going to signal a reduction in day to-day operating costs and great benefits in manageability and flexibility.
The virtual desktop was the most exciting development currently taking place, Devitt said.” I think this is amazing technology.”
