Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1037
www.iltanet.org 36 Peer to Peer CASE STUdIES T urner Padget Graham & laney, P.a., a columbia, south carolina-based law firm with five locations and 250 employees throughout the state, has the same challenges as any other typical law firm in today's economy. if even one attorney needs to work early, late, or on the weekend, the office doesn't close. consequently, as with most firms, it services are expected to be available whenever attorneys want to work — morning, noon and night — at costs that don't drain tightening revenue. A major challenge for law firm IT departments is to deploy, maintain and scale systems without pulling the plug on the revenue-generating engine that never sleeps. In today's economy, where every dollar counts and budgets are being squeezed, being able to do more with your IT investments with less total cost of ownership is a "must have" for survival. With a minimal server footprint, Turner Padget is now providing the high availability its attorneys demand, but it wasn't always that way. LAYING THE GROUNDWORK When I joined Turner Padget as Director of Technology, the picture was much different. The firm had a hodgepodge of low-end servers in each office with 100 percent direct-attached storage. Each of our offices had its own local Microsoft Exchange server, SQL servers, and Interwoven document management server. We knew that we needed to consolidate our environment and come up with a more efficient use of resources as we were not getting the best return on our server investments. There was just too much hardware for the number of users being supported. Maintaining platinum service contracts on all of those remote, unmanaged servers was an absolute necessity for business continuity, but this service came at a very high cost. REDUCING THE SERVER FOOTPRINT BY 60 PERCENT Using VMware Infrastructure software purchased through Dell, Turner Padget consolidated physical servers by running multiple virtual machines on servers running VMWare ESX. "Across our five offices, we reduced the physical server count by at least 60 percent through virtualization," says Mark Brophy, network administrator. "We're down to 12 physical servers in our Columbia data center, seven of which are ESX hosts in an HA/Shared Storage cluster; we're running about 40 virtual servers and workstations on them." In each of our offices outside of Columbia, Turner Padget now has only a single physical ESX server hosting four virtual servers, as compared to the old way of requiring three or four physical servers per site. Less physical servers means lower costs to acquire, maintain and manage those servers. But the consolidation process isn't done yet. Turner Padget is starting to take it even further and has begun to reduce the number to zero physical servers in those offices, thanks to a new product from Riverbed called RiOS Services Platform. It's VMWare without the server. This is great for the firm, as we have offices in five different geographic locations, hundreds of miles apart and only one network administrator. Turner Padget no longer needs to manage a handful of servers in each office or deploy expensive remote management tools and service contracts. The reduced need for inter-office travel, especially as the price of gas spiked in late 2008, was an unexpected bonus, too. Today, the firm is able to maintain the same level of service and network Virtualization: Doing More with Less "Turner Padget is starting to take it even further and has begun to reduce the number to zero physical servers . . ." by David Michel