Law firm Addleshaw Goddard is establishing a business
continuity plan based on virtual server technology from
VMWare.
The firm has more than 160 partners and a £125m annual turnover.
It runs VMWare’s ESX Server virtualisation software over a storage
area network to replicate servers and data from datacentres to a
co-location centre.
Virtualisation technology is gaining in popularity as it allows
users to run fewer servers in their datacentres; one large server
can replace several smaller ones. Addleshaw Goddard previously ran
one business application per server, but it is now moving its
applications to a cluster of 10 Hewlett-Packard DL 560 servers
running VMWare virtualisation software.
Daniel Simms, head of IT operations at Addleshaw Goddard, said
he developed a disaster recovery system to allow the firm to switch
to a back-up datacentre if the main centres failed. "We are
implementing storage virtualisation at the same time as server
virtualisation to allow us to replicate VMWare data to our
co-location centre. If a virtual server fails we can power up one
in the co-location centre," he said.
Business-critical applications running on the servers include
Exchange 2003 for e-mail, HR, library management and document
access systems, Simms said.