Canadian Law Firm Chaitons Chooses Scale Computing

Scale Computing, Inc., in hyper-converged storage, server, and virtualization solutions for midsized companies, announced that Toronto-based law firm Chaitons LLP has overcome the cost and complexity of upgrading its VMware-based infrastructure by choosing an HC3 virtualization platform.

Chaitons is an 80-person law firm that provides services across a range of specialties, including banking and financial services, commercial real estate, corporate law, insolvency and restructuring, litigation and mortgage enforcement. As an organization at the forefront of technology, Chaitons’ infrastructure had grown broadly to accommodate its various systems. Though spending ‘six figures’ to maintain its hardware on top of VMware licensing was acceptable to the firm at the time, limitations caused by databases that were growing too large caused the firm to re-evaluate its infrastructure approach.

“What happened was, it was a big mess,” said Dominique Chung, IT director, Chaitons. “There were so many people involved to do this and costs were skyrocketing just to update things. We would have been happy just running things as is, status quo, but with the upgrades needed, I said: ‘You know what? This is crazy!’ I began looking around to see if maybe the money we were paying for maintenance could be used to find some new solution. I could use the maintenance money and get an ROI very quickly.“

Chung began to look for hyper-converged solutions from a variety of vendors including Nutanix, Inc., SimpliVity Corp. and others. After seeing a presentation by Nutanix, a CDW representative mentioned that Scale Computing had something similar. Chung was sold on Scale after meeting with the company.

HC3 platform brings storage, servers, virtualization and management together in a single system. With no virtualization software to license and no external storage to buy, HC3 products lower out-of-pocket costs and simplify the infrastructure needed to keep applications running. They make the deployment and management of an available and scalable infrastructure as easy to manage as a single server.

Chaitons implemented a Scale’s HC4100 with 42TB of storage and 300GB of RAM. Installation took less than an hour with live migrations of the firm’s VMs taking place over a short period with no impact on operations. The company was able to reduce 45U of rack equipment to 3U while reducing its power draw. Two high powered APC cooling systems that ran full time in Chaitons’ server room are deployed in a staggered one-a-day configuration to double their effective lifespan.

“When deploying a SAN as shared storage in a virtualized environment, there is a massive amount of complexity involved in the day-to-day management of the infrastructure,” said Jeff Ready, CEO and co-founder, Scale Computing. “Rather than dealing with the storage guys and the VMware guys and the server guys, Chaitons was able to simplify their environment in a cost-effective manner by implementing a hyperconverged system from Scale Computing. By combining servers, storage and virtualization into a single, appliance-like solution, we were able to help Chaitons dramatically reduce their technology footprint, minimize power and cooling needs, and simplify management at a cost that the firm was paying in maintenance fees alone. For organizations looking to minimize the complexity and costs associated with their infrastructure, HC3 can’t be beat.“