Kennedys

Kennedys is one of the leading dispute resolution law firms in the City of London. The firm has 89 partners and six UK offices. Worldwide, Kennedys has offices in Spain, Dubai, Hong Kong and New Zealand and associated offices in the rest of the world. The firm is a major player in the insurance/reinsurance dispute resolution field and also has works in areas such as employment law, clinical negligence, and company and commercial law. The firm’s clients include many of the world’s leading insurers.

The challenge

Kennedys required a new office in Sydney, Australia, but setting up the specialist applications used in the legal environment would be time-consuming, and resources to support the roll-out were limited. Ian Lauwerys, IT Director for Kennedys, was sure that there was a faster and more efficient solution.

Lauwerys decided that a virtualized approach would be the answer. Because the applications within virtual machines are independent of the physical hardware, Kennedys could build the virtualized servers in the UK and have the project installation completed by a local partner, avoiding having to send UK staff across. Kennedys would save on hardware and shipping costs, while the overall length of time spent on the full roll-out was reduced from about eighteen months to three.

This case study was first published by VMware.

Download the PDF version.

Solution

Using VMware, the installation of applications was carried out in the UK and completed by a local partner in Australia. This process was completed in three months, and significantly faster than previous physical offices had been implemented

Deployment environment

• VMware® ESX Server 2.5
• VMware® VirtualCenter 1.5
• VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter
• Two HP DL385, with 8 GB RAM and two dualcore CPUs
• One HP DL380 with 2 GB RAM and one CPU
• Applications deployed include SQL Server, Exchange Server 2003 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, as well as specialist legal applications such as Tikit, BigHand and Claimbase

Results

• Complete set up of new office in Australia took only three months. Previous roll-outs took six months to be installed, while completing the entire installation process would take even longer
• Roll-out of legal applications was completed by experienced staff at head office, eliminating travel costs
• Server hardware required reduced by 50%
• Overall costs for completing installation of new office reduced by up to 50%
• Using virtual machines ensures that there is no downtime for applications, even in the event of a physical hardware failure
• Scalability of solution means that Kennedys can meet its growth targets - the Sydney office is now equipped to support over 75 staff
• In future, completing new office roll-outs will be faster - Lauwerys estimates that each one will take about a month from start to finish

© 1998-2007 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. Protected by one or more U.S. Patents Nos. 6,397,242, 6,496,847, 6,704,925, 6,711,672, 6,725,289, 6,735,601, 6,785,886, 6,789,156, 6,795,966, 6,880,022, 6,944,699, 6,961,806, 6,961,941, 7,069,413, 7,082,598, 7,089,377, 7,111,086, 7,111,145, 7,117,481, 7,149, 843 and 7,155,558; patents pending. VMware, the VMware “boxes” logo and design, Virtual SMP and VMotion are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.