One of Australia's largest adopters of VMware's ESX Server -- international law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques -- recovered every last dollar spent on the system three months before the migration was even complete.
Snapshot
source: Mallesons Stephen Jaques
- Operations
- Employees
- Financials
- Industry
An international commercial law firm which specialises in advising major corporations and financial institutions in Australia and Asia.
And ongoing cost savings of a similar amount are likely to occur year on year as a result of its virtualised rollout.
Mallesons virtualised 140 of its 290 servers required to operate its Australian and internationally based offices in an effort to reduce hardware maintenance, power and air-conditioning usage and datacentre real estate costs. A total of AU$300,000 was spent on the 12-month rollout.
It also wanted to increase performance and redundancy through the use of virtual servers.
The results, to date, have been so positive they have led to Mallesons making a pledge to ensure that any future server deployments are considered as virtual server candidates first, and the procurement of physical servers would only be considered where absolutely necessary.
"Our procurement costs were by far offset by the savings we made by removing so many hardware costs and saving datacentre space," Mallesons server and network infrastructure manager Steve Behringer said.
"We started seeing the benefits of virtualising our servers almost instantly ... now we plan to only purchase hardware that is VM-compatible which will help us realise even further improvements."
Mallesons' decision to become a somewhat early large adopter of VMware's ESX Server 2.5.3 was not only driven by cost.
With five offices in Australia and a presence in London, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, Mallesons required its main datacentre in Sydney to provide 24x7 uptime with high performance.
"We have 55 Technology staff, most of which are based in Sydney where most servers are located," Behringer said.
These staff ensure Mallesons' mission-critical applications such as its Microsoft Exchange 2003 e-mail, Interwoven worksite document and Aderant Keystone practice-management applications and online client-facing deal rooms, as well as SQL 2005 and its Cisco Callmanager Voice over IP communications network, are available to staff at all times.
Mallesons staff also use BlackBerrys for mobile e-mail, and Citrix for remote access to its company applications which usually run off Windows XP in the office environment.
"Our goal has always been high performance and high availability -- the firm has 2100 staff working in nine centres across three regions, so there are always people working somewhere around the clock here and overseas," Behringer said.
"If you have a physical server that is hosting 15 guests and it goes down? Well you have 15 guests disappear. That thought used to keep me up at night in a cold sweat."
So 18 months ago, when a fair portion of its 290 ageing HP and Dell servers running Windows Server 2003 required replacement, Behringer and Mallesons' manager of operations and architecture, Ben Swindale, knew a solution that would better cater for redundancy, as well as the increasing cost of real estate, had to be considered.
"We knew we could not justify replacing old tin with new from a business perspective -- we had to look further," Swindale said.
"We looked at blade-server technologies and came up with the same cost problem. We have our datacentres offsite, which really means we cannot afford to be flippant with real estate."
"We saw that we could dramatically reduce the amount of physical servers we required by using ESX virtual servers. We now still have the same amount of servers but 140 of these are now virtual," Behringer said.
Same old self created problems due to interwoven well constructed $MS dependencies, patches that break things and the "one app on one server" mentality that is all so nesessary when using windows server. Sounds very much like they needed to step up to Unix / linux rather than shift the issues to an alternative platform.
And think of the real savings if open source was introduced into the equation....