Law firm Kennedys is using virtualisation technology to set up IT systems for overseas offices in a fraction of the time it took previously, as well as saving power.

Kennedys employs 650 people globally with 11 satellite offices in countries including India and Hong Kong, providing services for insurance companies.

'We basically operate where our clients are, so we've opened a number of overseas offices in important areas for our clients,' said IT director Ian Lauwerys. 'We only have 24 IT people covering everything and they're all based in the UK, which is difficult for setting up projects globally.'

Previously, it took Kennedys between three and four years to fully set up IT services for a branch office overseas. Systems were built on a physical server in the UK, shipped over, and then set up by local IT firms in the country.

'It's not economically viable for us to start flying teams of suppliers and IT people out to far-flung locations for months on end. It was a difficult and costly process, because all the supplier expertise was in the UK so problems took a lot longer to serve,' said Lauwerys.

With the recently opened Sydney office, the IT team set up two virtual servers and installed applications in the UK, used a local IT company to set up the infrastructure in the Sydney office, then shipped the virtual servers on tape - no physical hardware was involved.

'It took us three months to go through the whole process, and now we could repeat that in under a month with VMware,' said Lauwerys.

'We used to need six servers to get the operation up and running and we've managed to get that down to two physical servers, so we're using a third of the amount of power that we were before, which is environmentally and financially beneficial.'

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Further Reading:

Platform Alliance ups focus on virtualisation

Virtualisation technology on the rise

IT managers wary of virtualisation