Jones Walker introduces innovative IT services for clients with virtual infrastructure using VMware on Dell servers with Intel processors

•  Backup/Recovery/Archiving•  Desktop/Laptop Refresh•  Desktop Computing•  Flexible Computing•  Green Computing•  Mobility•  Services•  Storage•  Virtualization—Client•  Virtualization—Server

“ Virtualization has helped us meet our internal needs with all the extra benefits that are well known. But the most important benefit is that it helps us serve our clients better by providing them with reliable and state of the art IT services.”Ruark Chick, CIO, Jones Walker

Customer Profile

Company: Jones Walker

Industry: Law

Country: United States

Employees: 624

Web: www.joneswalker.com

Business Need The law firm needed to keep up with rapid growth and focus on delivering innovative IT services to clients while strengthening disaster recovery.

Solution Jones Walker virtualized servers and desktops to respond faster to the needs of users and clients. The company’s servers and desktops are virtualized using VMware vSphere on Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers with Intel® Xeon® and Atom™ processors, a virtual desktop solution with VMware View and Dell OptiPlex™ flex clients, Dell PowerVault™ iSCSI SAN arrays and EMC SANs sourced through Dell.

  Benefits•  Able to offer new IT services to clients due to 

ability to create virtual infrastructures quickly

•  Reclaiming data center rack space with server virtualization

•  Projected decrease in hardware costs, power and cooling needs

•  3-year payback on virtual desktop investment

•  Near-zero recovery point and recovery time objectives

•  80% less time to deploy a new image with virtual desktops, accelerating operating system migrations

•  Improved security and data protection by hosting desktop images and data in data center

•  Reduced downtime for support staff

•  Able to avoid bringing on additional contract staff for desktop support

•  One-half FTE saved with Dell customer service

“ When somebody goes to run a report using a business intelligence application, I need to know that it will run smoothly and run fast. The Intel processors in our Dell servers really perform—they have been rock solid.” Ruark Chick, CIO, Jones Walker

The growth has put pressure on CIO Ruark Chick to develop the capacity to respond to a staggeringly large variety of unique scenarios and user needs. “I came from a banking operation where we’d roll out one standard image that met everyone’s needs,” says Chick. “That just doesn’t work here. Every project, every client, every case we take on is different and demanding. For example, we had one case where we had to put up an environment very quickly to enable our client to browse through documents. In our former environment, we could not have established a network and allocated disk space and server resources quickly enough to meet that need.”

Jones Walker has come to rely on a virtualized infrastructure to meet the growing demands on IT resources. “Virtualization has changed the whole paradigm of how we manage changes,” says Chick. “Virtualization makes it very easy and fast to roll out changes. Virtualization has also helped us to protect our clients’ information in the event of a major hurricane like Katrina. Our business runs on email and documents, and in the event of a natural disaster, we have to make sure that our email still works and our clients’ documents are still available.”

Saving hardware, saving power

Jones Walker’s foray into virtualization began with a trial of a Dell server. Formerly an HP shop, the firm hadn’t thought of switching until its Dell representative suggested that it try Dell. “He said, ‘You should try this server

out, I think this will be a better fit for your business,’” Chick says. “So he put a seed unit in front of us, and my entire staff and I were extremely impressed. The equipment was wonderful, very reliable and the cost

Rapid growth tends to force drastic changes in the way companies manage their IT operations. Consider Jones Walker, the oldest law firm in New Orleans and now, due to 40 percent growth in the past 10 years, one of the largest law firms in the Gulf South. Jones Walker recently merged with law firms in Lafayette, Louisiana and Birmingham, Mobile and Montgomery, Alabama, giving it a presence in Arizona, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, District of Columbia and Texas. The firm now has 13 sites, including 12 offices with a total of 300 attorneys and 324 support staff, as well as a “lights-out” co-location facility in Miamisburg, Ohio, with no employees.

Technology at Work

Services

Dell™ Consulting Services– Microsoft Exchange migration

Dell Support Services

Hardware

Dell Latitude™ E4300 laptops with Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processors

Dell OptiPlex™ FX160 desktops with Intel Atom™ processors

Dell PowerEdge™ R710 servers with Intel Xeon® processors 5600 series

Dell PowerVault™ MD3000i SAN arrays

EMC Celerra NS40 SANs

Software

Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010

Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 database

VMware View 4.0

VMware vSphere 4.0

Windows Server® 2008

Windows® XP Embedded

Windows 7

was better. So we made the decision to transition to Dell servers, and that’s when we started to virtualize.”

The firm now uses Dell PowerEdge R710 servers with Intel Xeon processors 5600 series at its main data center in New Orleans, a secondary site in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and the “lights-out” facility in Miamisburg. Jones Walker’s servers are now more than 90 percent virtualized, including some of its Microsoft Exchange servers and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 databases. Most of the firm’s servers now run Windows Server 2008.

“Virtualization has helped us meet our internal needs with all the extra benefits that are well known,” says Chick. “We’ve reduced the number of physical servers, which lets us reclaim rack space in our data centers. We’ve reduced our power and cooling costs. We have internal green initiatives, and virtualization meets those needs nicely. The cost reduction in physical equipment and management and the quick deployment aspects just make sense for our business. But the most important benefit is that it helps us serve our clients better by providing them with reliable and state of the art IT services. We can deploy extranets rapidly, and we can deploy technologies and infrastructures for clients to use that add tremendous value for them.”

The powerful Intel Xeon processors provide optimal performance for these customer environments, as well as internal applications. “When somebody goes to run a report using a business intelligence application, I need to know that it will run smoothly and run fast,” says Chick. “The Intel processors in our Dell servers really perform—they have been rock solid.”

Meeting near-zero  recovery objectives

At its larger offices in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, as well as the Miamisburg co-location site, the firm virtualizes its storage on EMC Celerra NS40 SANs purchased through Dell. “We have three-way replication of the storage between our New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Miamisburg sites, so that our data and applications are well protected against outages due to a

hurricane,” says Chick. “The replication is live, so that our recovery point objective is close to zero. Our recovery time objective is close to zero as well. It might take a half-hour to rebuild a database, but our clients would be up and running with almost no delay.”

The EMC storage enables the company to add additional disk space on the fly. “Frequently the client doesn’t know how much disk space they need when they request an IT service,” says Chick. “We can meet whatever need they have with no downtime. We can deploy virtual servers in a fraction of the time it took to stand up physical servers. Virtualization allows us to roll out resources in a hurry and roll them back just as fast, if necessary.”

Reducing downtime, easing management of distributed PCs

With so many locations to manage, the IT team wanted a way to efficiently deploy and maintain desktop systems for non-mobile support staff. Reducing downtime was critical to optimize efficiency. The company also wanted to migrate from Windows XP to Windows 7 and needed to accomplish this with as little disruption to the organization as possible.

Jones Walker engaged Dell Consulting Services to help meet these goals. “Dell has made great strides in staffing itself with service professionals who are committed to their clients, and we feel like the Dell consultants are part of our team,” says Chick. “All the IT projects I work on ultimately come down to how the firm can better serve our clients, and I truly feel that Dell’s corporate culture places that same value on customer service. We choose to supplement our staff with Dell Services when we have requirements for a project that go beyond our core skill sets. I don’t want to throw our IT staff into something new that they’d have to learn on the fly, while maintaining the systems we need to maintain—that’s a recipe for disaster. I want to bring in the experts for the core knowledge, and then let my team maintain the solution after the project is complete.”

The Dell consultants recommended a desktop virtualization solution, explaining that transitioning from

“ All the IT projects I work on ultimately come down to how the firm can better serve our clients, and I truly feel that Dell’s corporate culture places that same value on customer service.” Ruark Chick, CIO, Jones Walker

traditional desktops to virtualized clients would provide the firm with greater control over its remote systems, allow a cost-effective ‘rip and replace’ model for systems needing repairs and greatly simplify the upcoming transition to Windows 7. In addition, since the virtual desktop images and data are not stored locally on client machines, the company would be able to hold all its data in the data center, greatly improving security and minimizing the risk of painful data losses.

The office expansion in Lafayette provided the ideal opportunity to deploy the desktop virtualization solution using Dell OptiPlex FX160 flex clients with Intel Atom processors. The client machines have no spinning hard drives—just a small solid-state drive running Windows XP Embedded. Dell PowerEdge R710 servers run VMware View desktop virtualization software, and Dell PowerVault MD3000i SAN arrays host the virtual desktop data. The firm is now deploying the solution to support staff at the rest of its offices.

A faster migration to Windows 7

The results so far have been impressive. “Desktop deployments have been simplified since we control the complete system image in our main data center,” says Chick. “We also estimate that our transition time to Windows 7 will be reduced, since we can migrate our virtual desktops simply by updating the golden image, which Dell helped us build. Our time to update each PC will decrease by at least 80 percent, since all we have to do is reboot to a new

virtual desktop image, which takes a couple of minutes, versus taking 10 to 15 minutes per machine to image them individually. Also, our expected uptime has greatly increased by removing the operating system and data from the end user’s desktop.”

Chick expects a three-year payback for the desktop virtualization project. When the virtual desktops have been in place for three years, he can continue to keep them in service and scale the solution just by adding more CPU and more RAM to the servers. “We will avoid having to bring in additional contract staff for desktop support, which also contributes to the projected return on investment for desktop virtualization,” Chick notes.

The firm’s attorneys, most of whom are highly mobile, will not yet transition to the virtual desktops, and currently use Dell Latitude E4300 laptops with Intel Core 2 Duo processors.

Saving one-half an FTE with  Dell service and support

To ensure a seamless migration from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010, Jones Walker is once again using Dell Consulting Services. “Dell Services also helped us in three of our mergers,” says Chick. “We’re very satisfied with the way Dell has managed these engagements. We also buy all our Microsoft and VMware licenses through Dell. The way Dell supports us with customer service takes the place of one-half a full-time employee. Dell offers solutions that really empower us, and Dell advises us on directions to move on technology.”

Availability and terms of Dell Services vary by region. For more information, visit: dell.com/servicedescriptions

© May 2011. Intel, Intel Atom, Intel Core and Intel Xeon are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States or other countries. Microsoft, SQL Server, Windows and Windows Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. This case study is for informational purposes only. DELL MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS CASE STUDY. Reference number: 10009034

View all Dell case studies at: dell.com/casestudies