Morris James Rolled Out EMC and VMware Infrastructure

EMC Corporation announced that Morris James LLP, a multi-practice law firm with more than 50 attorneys and four offices in Delaware, has rolled out an EMC information infrastructure and implemented advanced EMC business continuity and backup solutions.

The consolidated IT environment has provided Morris James with significant cost savings due to slower server hardware growth, reduced power and cooling usage and more efficient storage and server maintenance, as well as improved availability of critical business data. These savings reflect Morris James’ ongoing program of cost containment to hold down client charges.

"Because we are a law firm, our data infrastructure grows very rapidly," said Christopher J. Kudlick, Morris James’ Senior Network Engineer. "This growth began causing space constraints on our servers. Consequently, we were forced to buy new servers just to bring in more disk capacity, which is very expensive. In only one year, we grew from 20 to 30 servers. We also forecasted that in two years, we would be close to 50 servers. We were correct."

To stem server growth and increase IT efficiency, Morris James deployed VMware ESX to virtualize the 30 hardware servers as four hardware servers running 50 virtual machines. The firm also consolidated its server-based storage onto an EMC CLARiiON fibre-channel storage system.

Morris James also uses EMC RepliStor software to continuously replicate changes to its Microsoft Exchange email environment to a branch office for disaster recovery, and uses EMC NetWorker software to back up Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server databases, financial systems and an Interwoven document management repository to CLARiiON. The SATA backups are stored offsite on tapes.

"Without EMC and VMware, we would have had to buy another 20 servers to support our growth. And because the existing 30 servers were due to be replaced within the last two years, hardware costs alone would have been close to $175,000," said Kudlick. "Instead, over last two years, we saved $250,000 and reduced our kilowatt reductions enough to power 20 residential houses. The remaining savings came from reduced power usage and server and storage maintenance costs."

The new EMC infrastructure also has enabled Morris James to roll out new applications more quickly. If additional servers or storage were required to support a new initiative, it used to take over two weeks for them to be purchased, shipped and implemented.

"One Thursday morning, our CIO said he wanted to roll out a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server for an intranet site," said Kudlick. "By afternoon, we had a new virtualized server up and running with SharePoint. Had we needed only new storage and not a virtual machine, it would only have taken 30 minutes. It’s a huge competitive advantage to be so responsive. And as attorneys become more technologically savvy, our firm’s ability to rapidly support new technologies is a terrific tool for recruiting top-tier attorneys, which in turn lets us provide better expertise and service to our clients."

Morris James also has expanded their disaster recovery and centralized data backup environment. "Our firm depends upon email access to function efficiently," said Kudlick. "We are now able to restore all of our email at the remote site in just three minutes. Our backup process is so automatic and centralized, we’re able to backup our entire environment in two to three hours and there hasn’t been a single failure since we implemented the infrastructure."

Morris James has also implemented the RSA SecurID two-factor authentication system powered by RSA Authentication Manager to secure its employees’ mobile and remote access to networked systems that contain sensitive company and customer information. To authenticate to the firm’s network using two factors, users enter a PIN and then a six digit one-time password displayed on their hardware token that changes every sixty seconds. Other users have been issued RSA SecurID software tokens that are integrated with everyday wireless handheld devices, and in this case, they enter a pin into the device and then an eight digit one-time password displayed on their Blackberry that changes every sixty seconds.

"As a law firm, we’re very sensitive about our clients’ confidential information that lives, moves and rests within our network. After we implemented RSA SecurID, the usage of our online applications actually went up since it gave people both the assurance and confidence that any critical data would not be compromised or breached," said Kudlick.