Logie-Smith Lanyon Lawyers - Server Virtualisation
Logie-Smith Lanyon is an Australian law firm which provides Australian and international businesses with legal expertise in the areas of Business & Corporate Law, Property & Construction, Arts, Media & Entertainment Law, Litigation & Dispute Resolution, Insolvency & Reconstruction and Employment & Industrial Law.
The Challenge
The firm, through business growth and sound strategy, needed to increase the capabilities of its server fleet to provide a high level of availability across core IT services and facilitate the growth of its Citrix Presentation Server solution for remote access.
The Solution
Kiandra designed and implemented a server virtualisation solution leveraging VMware Virtual Infrastructure suite on HP Proliant Server hardware. The virtualised environment consists of two primary VMware hosts and these run eight virtual guest servers with roles including Active Directory and networking services, replicated file storage, a fault-tolerant Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 deployment using standby continuous replication (SCR) functionality, Citrix Presentation Server for application virtualisation and additionally a legacy practice management system - migrated into the virtualised environment to overcome the risks of ageing hardware.
The SCR functionality of Exchange Server 2007 also provides resilience in the Exchange Server environment, allowing access to email services should one server fail. A virtualised SCR configuration is a cost effective solution for businesses which need a higher level of availability of their Exchange environment than a standard Exchange deployment but do not have the budget to implement a clustered solution.
The legacy practice management application is required for historical reference, however the hardware it was on was failing so the fastest way to mitigate the risks of a catastrophic failure was to image the system onto virtual host. This required no reconfiguration or reinstallation of software and protected the business from a costly impending hardware failure.
The full protection of user, email, application and system data was also paramount in the design of the solution and Logie-Smith Lanyon uses server image-based backups to enable fast recovery of servers in the virtualised environment. Backup-to-disk-to-tape with a smart offsite rotation strategy ensures that data is protected and taken offsite to mitigate a wide range of threats.
The firm also has a comprehensive disaster recovery plan in place to mitigate the risks of unplanned disasters, and this is tested by Kiandra twice-yearly to ensure it is up to date and the backup and recovery technologies operate correctly and with known recovery processes and timeframes.
The Benefits
By implementing server virtualisation technologies, Logie-Smith Lanyon was able to significantly improve service availability while reducing its server fleet, saving the firm approximately $48,000 in hardware capital expenditure and ongoing reduction in power and cooling expenses of around $12,600 over three years. To improve disaster recovery operations, VMware environment additionally allows all virtual servers to be migrated to one physical server should a hardware failure render one unavailable.
Kiandra designed and implemented the entire solution and provides support, monitoring and maintenance services and regular disaster recovery testing under a service agreement to keep the infrastructure running smoothly and with tested recovery procedures.