Law Firm Picks Virtual Iron

LOWELL, Mass. -- Virtual Iron Software (www.virtualiron.com), a provider of enterprise-class server virtualization software, today announced that Owen Bird, a law firm in Vancouver, British Columbia, is deploying its virtualization solution across its Windows computing infrastructure. The firm expects significant benefit from the software, including reduction of its server environment by almost two thirds, streamlined management of its computing environment and easy provisioning and set-up of systems for new users.

We tested out pretty much all of the virtualization offerings before settling on Virtual Iron,” said Stephen Bakerman, IT manager at Owen Bird. “Even if we had the money to go with VMware, I would still go with Virtual Iron. Their feature set is very competitive with VMware. The support is phenomenal and the technology capabilities continue to improve. If you’re looking for something that’s simple to use and easy to get around with, Virtual Iron is the way to go.”

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 Virtual Iron. Owen Bird started the virtualization project with 18 servers and it expects to reduce that number to six using Virtual Iron. 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 Bakerman, though, there were more savings than just hardware purchases this year.

“Without Virtual Iron, 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 virtualized our server environment.”

Virtual Iron Software Inc.