The two key planks of London-based international law firm Allen & Overy's data centre strategy hinge on risk management and cost effectiveness.
In response to the first impetus, the organisation, which employs 4,900 staff in 25 countries, has hired an outsourcing supplier to provide it with disaster recovery facilities in Winnersh, near Reading.
The £5.5m deal with Savvis was signed in July 2005 and is expected to last for five-and-a-half years.
Andrew Brammer, head of global IT operations for Allen & Overy, says the catalyst for outsourcing was moving headquarters to Spitalfields in London.
‘The actual outsourcing itself was cost-neutral as we already ran a disaster recovery facility in Vauxhall, but we felt that we could manage risk more effectively if we moved further out of the geographical centre of London and critically, if we separated our people from our data,’ he says.
While the two used to be housed together at the same site in the City, the fear was that in the event of a disaster, both would be affected simultaneously and the business could not operate.
‘We provide a strong remote working capability, so if we suffered any threat that denied us access to the building, we could continue working remotely from home or a business recovery centre,’ says Brammer.
‘But if we lost Savvis’ data centre capability, which is unlikely, we would be able to do disaster recovery from the data centre at the office.’
The Winnersh data centre now houses all of Allen & Overy’s production systems. The Spitalfields site, meanwhile, will hold the firm’s disaster recovery infrastructure, including a replicated storage area network to mirror data in real time, and its development and control testing systems.
The transfer of head office to Spitalfields and its 2,500 personnel, which includes 207 IT staff, is due to take place by the end of the year.
The second big driver for outsourcing the data centre was finding ways to run IT more cost-effectively.
‘Over the past 18 months, we have been undertaking a big programme of consolidation, rationalisation and virtualisation,’ says Brammer.
‘We have taken out about 35 per cent of the cost of running our estate by reducing our enterprise server footprint, which has an impact at all levels in terms of software licences and support.
‘By reducing the numbers, you reduce the effort involved in managing it.’
The firm has standardised on HP as its sole hardware supplier and runs only the Microsoft Windows 2003 or Server 2000 operating systems.
But Brammer says the firm continues to look for opportunities to consolidate further, and will use technologies such a VMware and Citrix to free up more equipment.
This consolidation policy will also be broadened out to cover Allen & Overy’s 25 data centres worldwide, starting from next year.
A major two-year programme will see the firm create three regional hubs in London, Hong Kong and New York, in a move expected to generate cost efficiencies, improved risk management and ease of deployment. A smaller data centre in Dubai will also remain in place.
‘Significant efficiencies can be gained from bringing hardware back to a single point,’ says Brammer.
‘‘You get to make real cost savings, but you also gain greater availability and resilience as everything is on a single piece of enterprise hardware,’ says Brammer.
Further reading:
reader comments