Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe Solves Remote Access Performance Challenges with Nutanix Complete Cluster

Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe is a globally recognized law firm with a strong presence across the United States, Europe, and Asia. Known for its high-quality practices, Orrick offers a mix of transactional and litigation services, making it one of the leading global law firms. With 23 offices worldwide, the firm is committed to delivering exceptional legal services to its clients. Orrick's IT department plays a crucial role in supporting the firm's operations, especially as it continues to expand internationally. The IT team is tasked with ensuring that the firm's technological infrastructure is robust, scalable, and capable of meeting the demands of its diverse user base, which includes office staff and developers. As the firm grows, the IT department is focused on enhancing its virtualization efforts to improve performance and efficiency, while also reducing costs and management overhead. Orrick's commitment to innovation and excellence is reflected in its adoption of cutting-edge technologies to support its global operations.

With continued international expansion, the Orrick IT department was looking for new ways to cost-effectively support additional virtualization efforts while meeting the performance requirements of its end users, including office staff and developers. In addition, the IT management team wanted to improve organizational efficiency by enabling a more diverse group of IT personnel to deploy and manage virtualized workloads without requiring a specialized team with virtualization, server and storage management skills. Over the past two years that the Orrick IT team began developing its virtualization efforts, it accrued multiple vendors for server and SAN hardware, as well as two different kinds of fibre switches, resulting in six interfaces and vendors to work with. As the team deployed additional virtualized workloads from testing and development to production, they would bring on more capacity to support these new workloads but quickly ran into performance challenges such as disk contention issues. For their remote access use case, the IT team had virtualized 6 Citrix XenApp servers for each of its three regions. A snowstorm caused the amount of remote access traffic to spike due to additional users. The IT team quickly realized the IO requirements would demand significant overprovisioning of storage to meet the desired performance characteristics and ensure a good user experience whenever traffic significantly increased.

Using a single Nutanix Complete Block in a 4-node Nutanix Complete Cluster configuration, the Orrick IT team was able to deploy 6 Citrix XenApp servers for applications and 7 for desktops in the US while exceeding the required level of IOPS in a compact, 2U solution that combines both compute and storage capabilities. Orrick IT was now able to support up to 1000 users at once in a DR scenario, such as another snowstorm in one of their regions. With locally attached, shared storage in the form of Fusion-io ioMemory (1.3 TB per Nutanix block) and SATA hard drives (20 TB per Nutanix block) in Nutanix’ innovative converged architecture, virtual machines are both run and stored in the same box. This eliminates the network bottleneck seen in traditional solutions that can cause performance issues. By not having to buy more capacity for their traditional SAN, the Orrick IT group was able to save over 30% in capital expenses for this project. Orrick is currently starting an effort to test out virtual desktops to provide some end users with the option of a full desktop experience that can be accessed from home or any of the Orrick offices. To support their development users, the Orrick IT team provisions virtualized Sharepoint with SQL. For a complete testing and development environment, IT would provide a multi-server VM configuration as well as allocation of additional storage capacity. Multiple IT engineers were required to setup and configure this environment, and lead time could be a week or more. With the Nutanix Complete Cluster, Orrick was able to configure a separate storage pool that could be used for these developer workloads, and could grow dynamically without needing a storage engineer to reconfigure a traditional SAN. Nutanix enabled the operations group on the Orrick IT team to respond directly to tickets coming from developers and quickly provision a multi-server VM configuration via the Nutanix management interface without ever touching a SAN. Developers now

• Better user experience with increased IOPS performance and less hardware needed to serve more users.
• Reduction in management overhead due to ease of provisioning virtualized workloads with unified interface for compute and storage resources.
• With a robust remote access disaster recovery solution in place, Orrick is poised to support additional users and new offices as the company continues its international expansion to Asia by leveraging Nutanix’ scale-out capabilities.

• 30% capital expense savings over existing server and storage solution.