Deploying virtualisation across its Windows
computing infrastructure has led to Vancouver
law firm Owen Bird making
significant business benefit. So far Owen Bird
has been able to reduce its server environment by almost two
thirds, streamlined management of its computing environment and
easy provisioning and set-up of systems for new users.
Owen Bird currently supports about 90 users in a Windows-only
environment. The firm is running a number of critical workloads in
a virtual environment including its Blackberry enterprise server in
full production; its complete training/test accounting package
running on SQL server; and all of its production Terminal Servers,
which are running 24/7. The firm is also building all its test
servers on the Virtual Iron virtualisation solution.
Owen Bird started the virtualisation project with 18 servers and it
expects to reduce that number to six. This will enable it to avoid
buying five new high end servers, saving the firm an estimated
$70,000 this year in hardware alone and roughly $30,000 per year
thereafter. According to Stephen Bakerman, IT manager, though,
there were more savings than just hardware purchases this year.
“Without [virtualisation], we would need to expand our server
room,” he added. “The firm was running out of space and our power
and cooling requirements were growing out of control. This alone
would have cost the firm another $75,000 if we hadn’t virtualised
our server environment.”
The firm also expects
significant operational
benefits using advanced virtual management capabilities. For
example, Bakerman can now provision a new server in a virtual
environment and have it up and running in minutes rather than the
week or more it used to take to get a physical server up and
running. The firm is also taking advantage of availability and
disaster recovery capabilities to support automatic failover and
automated policy-based management. Eventually, Bakerman expects to
virtualise the firm’s entire computing environment.