UK Law firm Stephenson Harwood With Xsigo and Dell/Compellent

Xsigo Systems, Inc., announced that UK-based Stephenson Harwood, a full service international law firm, has deployed Xsigo virtual I/O as part of a virtualised data centre build-out, achieving 4X faster I/O performance and a 66% reduction in storage and networking connectivity costs.

Xsigo virtual I/O consolidates server connectivity and allows a single server connection to act as many, in the same way as a virtualised server enables one physical host to appear as multiple devices. Available with up to 40Gb bandwidth per server connection, Xsigo provides the throughput needed to accelerate applications and management tasks such as vMotion and data backup.

Stephenson Harwood purchased two Xsigo VP560 I/O directors to ensure maximum I/O between virtual servers and SAN storage by offloading the majority of server-to-server traffic from the Ethernet core, and to simplify and de-risk a forthcoming premises move.

"At Stephenson Harwood, the IT systems group supports everything from virtual desktops to back-office operations and data discovery projects," said Chris Petrie, IT director of Stephenson Harwood. "We had planned to expand our use of 10GbE, but found that Xsigo virtual I/O could deliver four times the I/O performance to our servers and would accommodate FC connections as well, all for about the same cost as a 10GbE infrastructure alone."

Stephenson Harwood’s virtualisation environment consists of HP rack-mount servers, VMware Vsphere 4.1 software, RESDynamic Desktop Studio, Quest vWorkspace, Extreme Networks Ethernet switches, QLogic Fibre Channel switches and Dell Compellent storage.

Petrie continued: "In addition to significantly reducing our equipment requirements, Xsigo let us efficiently re-use our existing 1GbE infrastructure and reduced our FC port count needs by 2/3, significantly reducing cabling and port costs and minimising disruption."

Xsigo has simplified the law firm’s backend infrastructure and streamlined configuration tasks, allowing the IT team to deploy hosts with exacting I/O configurations. Its virtual I/O technology has unshackled Stephenson Harwood’s infrastructure from snarls of interfaces and cables, letting them dismantle and move an entire private cloud environment to new premises and have it up and running in an amazing 16 hours.

Petrie concluded: "We now have more capacity and flexibility and look forward to flexing our infrastructure to meet the challenges of a dynamic and growing business."

"Law firms such as Stephenson Harwood now include cutting-edge data management as one of their core-competencies," said Mark Hardy, Xsigo director of EMEA. "Xsigo provides the ideal complement to Stephenson Harwood’s virtualised data centres by allowing them to maximise asset utilisation, re-purpose resources on demand, and help deliver a more productive work environment for its staff."