Opening up

Six-office law firm Stanley Tee LLP has implemented open source and virtualisation technology, deploying Novell solutions to form an architecture that supports both Linux and Microsoft systems.

By Ian Fretwell, partnership secretary, Stanley Tee LLP

At Stanley Tee LLP we pride ourselves on adopting cutting-edge technologies to optimise business processes, especially where case and practice management is involved. As well as ongoing enhancement of our core systems, we currently have a major initiative in seeking to reduce the volume of paper in the office environment by including the introduction of scanning technology to digitise client correspondence.

To support these important application enhancements we needed to move to a more modern and agile IT infrastructure. The availability of file servers is critical in handling the volumes of documentation in any law firm, and at the same time it is vital to have continuity and integrity in our practice management system (PMS), not least to ensure constant time recording, tracking and monitoring.

To achieve our ambitions, the IT team wanted to create a flexible, scalable architecture that would maximise some of the latest virtualisation technologies, while at the same time consolidating 16 existing servers onto a more compact IBM platform. We undertook a significant review of the potential virtualisation solutions available. We considered VMware, but we weren’t keen on the proprietary nature of the software or the pricing structure. In fact, we quickly realised that our best option was to use open source software wherever we could. This would enable us to achieve impressive technical results on a lean IT budget without becoming tied to specific vendors.

Novell solution

For these reasons we turned to Novell.
By deploying Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise and hosting Xen virtual environments, we got the best of both worlds: open source technology backed by enterprise-class support, performance and stability. On top of Xen sits a number of virtualised Microsoft Windows environments that run core applications, and several virtualised Novell Open Enterprise Server environments that provide file services. Novell also ensures that the virtualised workload can fail over from one physical server to another if there is a hardware fault.

The combination of Novell, Xen and IBM gives us great confidence in our infrastructure. We have seen a marked improvement in availability, and are planning to move our Novell GroupWise e-mail servers into the Xen environment too. In addition we have migrated Novell’s systems-management solutions to the Xen environment to simplify and automate software updates and the management of servers and desktop machines.

Benefits of Linux and virtualisation

The move to Novell solutions has received widespread support across the firm. Business users and IT specialists alike have been impressed by both availability and performance. While there are no specific benchmarks, the new infrastructure is certainly robust enough for our users’ needs.

Another advantage we are seeing using virtualisation is the acceleration of server provisioning. When a request from the business requires the IT team to set up a new server, there is no longer any need to procure, order, deliver, install and configure a new physical machine. Instead we can create a new virtualised environment in a matter of minutes.

Moreover, Novell gives us a low-cost, highly-manageable solution for mixed Linux and Microsoft Windows computing. By working seamlessly with our Microsoft and Linux technologies, we have established a fully interoperable environment that allows us to be flexible with how we deploy and manage our core systems.

The whole purpose of the project was to simplify our infrastructure and ensure that key business systems could be managed and protected more effectively. We now have an architecture that makes it possible to move forward with our ambitious application-enhancement plans – paving the way towards that ever-desirable paperless office and a yet more efficient enterprise.

Ian Fretwell is partnership secretary at Stanley Tee LLP. He can be contacted at: if@stanleytee.co.uk