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Tight on Space, Law Firm Goes Virtual: Page 2 of 4

The ability to accommodate more work in the available space and to support a disaster recovery solution made storage virtualization compelling for the law firm. And the more the company incorporated virtualization into its computing environment, the better things got.

"I would say that most people have no idea that we have virtualized anything," Roden says. "From a user standpoint, there's no difference. It's been the same and, in some cases, much better. We virtualized some old Win2K servers, and we're getting reports that they're running much better.

"We know the storage utilization is working better because we have less of a need to pre-allocate," he says. "Before that, most of our storage was direct attached. We had to anticipate what we'd need in the future," then allocate the storage that he thought would be needed. That process was necessarily less than precise. "Now we can migrate a server to another drive," he says.

The added flexibility means that GDLD doesn't need to buy storage that it may never need or use. Instead, the firm can do more with less. "We had run as many as four racks," Roden says. With virtualized storage, he doesn't need to do that anymore. "We're getting ready to remove a rack. The other three aren't full." Another benefit: Before the move to a virtualized environment, he upgraded the data center's air conditioning to keep up with the heat generated by the equipment. But that's changed, too. "We don't anticipate having to do that again."

While most companies look at virtualization as a way to save money on space, power, and cooling, those weren't the prime motivators for GDLD. The IT department has a fixed amount of space for the data center, and the power and cooling is covered in the rent. But flexibility and the need to do everything with limited resources were critical.