Tight on Space, Law Firm Goes Virtual

Baltimore is home to more than just the famed Inner Harbor, the historic USS Constellation, and the architectural landmark of Camden Yards. This city is also home to Goodell, DeVries, Leech & Dann, a local law firm that is national in scope. As you'd expect at a firm with such a broad reach, it has lots of data -- enough that simple storage solutions won't do the job.

"About half of our servers are virtualized," says David Roden, director of technology for the firm. "We use NetApp for storage and we use Virtual Iron for just the virtual machines." The firm manages 2 Tbytes of storage under Virtual Iron, which supports 18 virtual machines.

According to Roden, as data and applications began to grow in number and demand more resources, the firm was faced with a dilemma -- space, which it leases from a landlord. "As we began to accumulate older and newer applications we began to accumulate a lot of servers," Roden says. "We have a limited amount of space we can dedicate to storage and a limited amount of air conditioning. We had to look for a way to preserve legacy applications. In the fall of '07 we had to look at virtualization."

Roden looked at all of the major vendors in the virtualization market, including VMware, XenSource, and Microsoft, and chose Virtual Iron. "There's no denying that from a price standpoint, there's more bang for the buck," he says. Even better, "you don't need to do any sort of installation on the nodes." Each node on the storage network boots from the server, he notes.

While the primary motivation for adopting virtualization was to allow the firm's growing needs to be accommodated in its limited facilities, there were other reasons. "We wanted to greatly improve our disaster recovery capability," Roden says. He noted that the company only has one office, which also limited its flexibility. "We couldn't work out of a branch office or do staging at a branch office. This made it easy to migrate to another box and bring it up."The ability to accommodate more work in the available space and to support a disaster recovery solution made storage virtualization compelling for the law firm. And the more the company incorporated virtualization into its computing environment, the better things got.

"I would say that most people have no idea that we have virtualized anything," Roden says. "From a user standpoint, there's no difference. It's been the same and, in some cases, much better. We virtualized some old Win2K servers, and we're getting reports that they're running much better.

"We know the storage utilization is working better because we have less of a need to pre-allocate," he says. "Before that, most of our storage was direct attached. We had to anticipate what we'd need in the future," then allocate the storage that he thought would be needed. That process was necessarily less than precise. "Now we can migrate a server to another drive," he says.

The added flexibility means that GDLD doesn't need to buy storage that it may never need or use. Instead, the firm can do more with less. "We had run as many as four racks," Roden says. With virtualized storage, he doesn't need to do that anymore. "We're getting ready to remove a rack. The other three aren't full." Another benefit: Before the move to a virtualized environment, he upgraded the data center's air conditioning to keep up with the heat generated by the equipment. But that's changed, too. "We don't anticipate having to do that again."

While most companies look at virtualization as a way to save money on space, power, and cooling, those weren't the prime motivators for GDLD. The IT department has a fixed amount of space for the data center, and the power and cooling is covered in the rent. But flexibility and the need to do everything with limited resources were critical."There is the ability to deploy things fast," Roden says. "We're in the process of putting in some additional applications. You don't have to spend days putting together a server. You can do it rapidly by cloning a server or even do it from scratch."

This added flexibility has allowed GDLD to create an offsite disaster recovery solution by taking advantage of the virtualization management capabilities of Virtual Iron's VI-Center. "It changes our perspective on backups and disaster recovery and business continuity," Roden says. "In the past, you'd end up with a whole variety of servers and equipment. Even if you back them up, the chances that you will be able to restore them becomes a problem." While he could hire a third-party disaster recovery vendor to handle the problem, "it becomes enormously expensive."

"With virtualization, the hardware isn't an issue as long as Virtual Iron supports it," Roden says. "We brought up Virtual Iron at the co-lo [collocation site]. We could bring up VMs [virtual machines] at the co-lo and re-establish applications."

Roden says the firm has seen a return on its investment in 12 months, based on maintenance savings and new virtual servers that didn't require new hardware. He spent around $30,000 on the Virtual Iron implementation, which he says was about $15,000 less than a comparable VMware installation would have cost at the time. He also says the ability to replicate an entire server as a virtual hard disk has reduced backup costs and eliminated the need for a separate replication or CDP system for its Tier 2 servers.

The move to virtualization has been a real plus for the firm from both a cost perspective and because of the flexibility it brings, he says, and it has reduced hardware costs and simplified server management. "We've accomplished what weve set out to accomplish," he says.0