When you think of a law office, do you envision walls of books? These days, if the walls of books are there, they’re for show. The real action is in the walls of servers in the data center. Legal firms are on the forefront of data handling, and virtualized servers play an increasing role.

Where you find companies virtualizing servers, virtual I/O probably follows close behind. So today we were delighted to announce that Stephenson Harwood, one of the fastest growing firms in London, deployed Xsigo.

For law firms, its all about efficiency. With electronic discovery, document handling, and office management, the most adept firms can deliver a better service at less cost.

One expert in the field stated, “You really cannot practice in books these days. It isn’t doable because of the risk of missing information.” Firms need to be efficient in their information handling and in their compute infrastructure.

And like any sophisticated consumer, they’ve found the ways to make that back end system as efficient as possible.

About their Xsigo infrastructure, Chris Petrie, IT director of Stephenson Harwood, stated, “We had planned to expand our use of 10G Ethernet, but found that Xsigo virtual I/O could deliver four times the I/O performance to our servers and would accommodate Fibre Channel connections as well, all for about the same cost as a 10G Ethernet infrastructure alone.”

Private Cloud in 16 Hours

Benefits extended beyond performance as well. As a growing firm they knew that a facilities move was in the cards, and with the simpler virtual I/O infrastructure they were able to dismantle and move an entire private cloud environment to new premises and have it up and running in an amazing 16 hours.