Legal Technology Journal

A look at how the use of virtualisation helped Kennedys in setting up the IT system of a new office on the other side of the world.  Kennedys is a London-based law firm specialising in dispute resolution and services to the insurance industry. The firm has a number of overseas offices in Europe and the Far East and, in early 2006, it decided to launch a new office in Sydney, Australia.

The challenge

Kennedys’ 23-strong UK-IT team was faced with a challenging timetable that required it to deliver a working IT infrastructure to a new office on the other side of the globe within two months of project kick-off, plus a set of highly specialised and integrated client-server applications within a further month. The systems were required to support 25 users at launch, and scaleable to support 50-75 users within the first 18 months.

The Kennedys IT team did not have the resources available to deploy a technical team in Sydney for the duration of the project. The team had learnt from previous overseas implementations that building the new infrastructure in the UK and shipping hardware to Sydney would not meet the required timescales or the project’s budgetary constraints.

Due to the specialised nature of the applications employed, it was clear that it would be impossible to find a local IT supplier with the necessary implementation and support skills to install and configure them from scratch.

The solution

Following a successful small-scale deployment of VMware ESX Server 2, the firm’s IT director, Ian Lauwerys, developed an innovative strategy to exploit server virtualisation technology, enabling the IT team to work with Kennedys’ key UK suppliers to build, configure and test the complete Sydney infrastructure in the UK. This proven solution could then be shipped to Sydney in a matter of days on backup tape for installation by a local IT supplier on a mirror VMware environment.

To date, large enterprises have obtained significant benefits from virtualisation through server consolidation in data centres. Most mid-sized businesses have limited their use of the technology to non-production environments such as development, testing and disaster recovery. Basing an overseas office’s infrastructure on VMware was a bold step in a typically conservative industry, although Kennedys had already gained a good deal of confidence in the technology through a comprehensive training programme and a low-risk product deployment in the UK.

Nonetheless, Lauwerys sold the vision to nervous senior management and a highly sceptical IT team. He says: ‘We were faced with a near impossible task, in light of the short time-scales and limited budget. Our only options were to proceed confidently with my strategy, or to fail to deliver what the business required.’

The project

The decision made, the UK IT team worked closely with VMware specialist Intercept IT to procure a test-bed system consisting of two HP DL385 Servers running ESX Server 2, plus a third server running Virtual Center, Vizioncore ESX Ranger Pro and Backup Exec. A set of six virtual Microsoft Windows 2003 servers were built on the test-bed system, and the various applications were installed, configured and integrated by their respective suppliers in a matter of weeks.

Lauwerys remarks: ‘We were expecting a lot of resistance from some of our application providers as we had heard a lot of tales of vendors refusing to support their applications in virtual server environments. We were pleasantly surprised by the reaction. All were more than happy to go ahead, and there were absolutely no issues during the installation process.’

The UK team also built standard desktop and laptop images, and configured a test virtual private network (VPN). This enabled complete end-to-end testing and quality assurance of all applications and servers in the UK.

The Sydney end of the project was particularly challenging, as several members of the new Kennedys team had a number of high-profile cases in progress and needed to hit the ground running. The office premises only became available for occupation on Friday 2 June, with the new team due to start work on Monday 5 June.

Kennedys had contracted with a local IT provider, Nexon Asia Pacific, to supply all hardware, software and services to the Sydney office. Following a marathon effort by the Kennedys office manager and Nexon over the weekend, the team had an interim solution with basic e-mail, word-processing, digital dictation, file and print, and telephony services available on the Monday morning as planned.

Nexon then worked with VMware partner TAS to build and configure a VMware environment to mirror the UK test-bed environment according to specifications provided by the UK team and Intercept IT. Upon completion of the UK build, the entire set of virtual server images was shipped by courier on tape, along with desktop/laptop disk images on DVD.

Upon receipt of the tapes three days later, Nexon loaded the virtual servers, which were tested by two of Kennedys’ application specialists who had travelled to Sydney to undertake training on the new systems. Once final configuration was completed, desktops and laptops were re-imaged over the weekend and staff were then trained on the suite of specialist applications over the next two weeks.

According to Lauwerys, there were a few fraught hours over the go-live weekend. ‘One of the two VMware servers started experiencing intermittent hardware problems soon after we had passed the point of no return,’ he explains. ‘Thanks to the use of VMware, we were able to deploy the affected virtual servers on the functioning box within a few minutes, something that would have been impossible in a physical environment.’

The fault was quickly traced to an unseated memory module and both boxes were back in working order by Monday morning. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,’ Lauwerys says, ‘and in this case it was that we were able to prove the value of VMware to business continuity even before we’d gone live!’