Bird & Bird

IN BRIEF

Industry

• Legal

Challenge

• Poor application performance during deployment of centralized document management system

Solution

• 22 Riverbed Steelhead appliances
• Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC)
• Riverbed Services Platform (RSP)
• Steelhead Mobile

Benefits

• 20x improvement in file download speeds for critical document management application
• RSP enabled server-less solution for smaller offices
• 7x reduction in bandwidth utilization and bandwidth deferred for at least three years
• 10 caching servers removed

Bird & Bird

Riverbed Steelhead appliances Reduce Time Taken to Access Mission Critical Applications and Bring Cost Savings to Law Firm

Bird & Bird (www.twobirds.com) is a global law firm, with a rare and invaluable grasp of strategic commercial issues. It combines exceptional legal expertise with deep industry knowledge and refreshingly creative thinking, to help clients achieve their commercial goals. The firm has over 1400 employees including 850 lawyers in 21 offices across Europe and Asia, as well as close ties with firms in other parts of the world.

Challenge: Poor application performance during deployment of centralized document management system

Bird & Bird had undertaken a project to deploy a centralized document management system to simplify file structures, and provide a single matter file for every client, regardless of location. The firm selected and deployed Autonomy iManage as its mission-critical application. iManage is a document management tool that provides a shared environment for storing business content. Documents — both paper and electronic records — e-mail messages, and other media are consolidated in a central library, making them easier to find, share, and reuse.

The vendor for the iManage application proposed a solution to support centralization, in the form of a caching server located in each office. This approach worked for many of Bird & Bird’s European offices, but for offices further away from the data center, the high performance expectations could not be achieved, and a number of users were adversely affected by the strategy.

Tim Collinson, network manager at Bird & Bird explains: “As we went through the migration process, some of our users began to experience problems accessing iManage over the WAN, as well as poor performance with other applications. In some offices, iManage response times didn’t meet our high expectations to respond to a search request.

Our lawyers need to access data quickly, and they were not prepared to wait to access information. Any delay is considered unacceptable, and the lawyers were reluctant to use the document management system with this level of performance.”.

Bird & Bird had also grown significantly over the past four years, resulting in a growth of traffic traversing the wide area network (WAN). Staff relied on Microsoft Exchange, a centralized practice management system, SQL databases, and in-house developed web applications to conduct their day-to-day operations. The firm, therefore, faced the prospect of increasing bandwidth capacity in order to cope with this extra demand.

Solution: 20x improvement in application download speeds with Riverbed WAN optimization

Bird & Bird decided to look for alternative ways of resolving the issue of poor application performance. A partner company recommended a WAN optimization solution from Riverbed Technology, and Bird & Bird decided to test the solution on a “try before you buy” basis. A Riverbed® Steelhead® appliance was installed at Bird & Bird’s Stockholm office and another at the firm’s data center, based in the UK.

“We wanted to see if the Riverbed solution would make a difference - and we found that it made a big difference,” says Collinson. “Suddenly, our users in Stockholm were able to access documents in seconds and a visible improvement was measured at we believe around a 20x improvement in application performance over the WAN. We now had a solution to our major headache and we recognized that the problem was essentially one of latency. Riverbed enabled us to overcome these issues successfully, literally overnight.

Benefits: Caching servers removed, 7x reduction in bandwidth utilization resulting in bandwidth upgrade delayed for at least three years; and RSP enables server-less branch offices

Bird & Bird has now installed 22 Riverbed Steelhead appliances in its data center, disaster recovery (DR) site, and 20 offices. With Steelhead appliances installed Bird & Bird has been able to remove 10 caching servers from its branch offices, thus reducing costs and IT management.

In addition by deploying Riverbed, Bird & Bird has seen a 7x reduction in bandwidth utilization, which has enabled the firm to delay a bandwidth upgrade. At the Bird & Bird office in The Hague, Netherlands, replacing the caching server with a Steelhead appliance has delivered an ROI in less than a year. “Not only have we seen a great return on investment with Riverbed but we’ve also been able to delay a bandwidth upgrade for more than three years, and delivered dramatic application performance improvements. This has made the decision to invest in Riverbed the right decision,” says Collinson.

Bird & Bird has also deployed the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) at its Warsaw and Shanghai offices. RSP allows customers to deploy local services in all their global offices without the need to manage and maintain full-blown servers by running up to five additional services and applications virtually on VMware in a protected partition within the Steelhead appliance.

The benefits include minimizing the hardware needed, enabling better consolidation of IT operations, reducing costs, and simplifying administration, while still delivering essential local services. “Our Warsaw office grew four-fold in the space of 18 months. The office was initially set up as a low cost, low infrastructure office, with only network hardware and a Steelhead appliance.

But as the number of office staff grew, it was decided to run Windows Domain Controller on the RSP,” says Collinson. “For the Shanghai office, the decision was made to implement RSP when the office was set up to keep infrastructure costs to an absolute minimum.” Bird & Bird has decided to repeat this strategy and deploy the RSP solution as other smaller offices grow in size.

Looking Ahead

Bird & Bird has also purchased Steelhead Mobile. “This decision was a result of the firm wanting to prepare for future global developments. It’s possible that we will open offices with just one or two employees and it would not be cost-effective to deploy a Steelhead appliance at these locations.

However, by providing these office based employees with Steelhead Mobile, they will receive the same fast access to the firm’s resources as those employees using the Steelhead appliances. If the offices grow over time, similar to our Warsaw office, then we can implement the Steelhead appliances and RSP. With Riverbed we have been able to future proof our investment,” says Collinson.

SUMMARY

Bird & Bird had centralized its document management system which resulted in some users experiencing up to 15 minutes delay when submitting a search request. This made the system difficult for the lawyers to use and affected fee-earner efficiency and productivity.

Bird & Bird deployed a Riverbed WAN optimization solution and experienced a 20x improvement in file download speeds. Lawyers could now access mission critical data in a matter of seconds. Bird & Bird also saw a 7x reduction in bandwidth utilization. This has alleviated the requirement to upgrade bandwidth for over three years. The firm has also installed the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) enabling a low cost, no hardware solution for a number of its smaller offices.

“Our lawyers need to access data quickly, and they were not prepared to wait to access information.”

“We wanted to see if the Riverbed solution would make a difference - and we found that it made a big difference.”

“For the Shanghai office, the decision was made to implement RSP to keep infrastructure costs to an absolute minimum.”

“With Riverbed we have been able to future proof our investment.”