TWM Solicitors uses Veeam to guarantee availability of IT services in virtual environment

TWM had implemented EMC's VNX platform in 2013, enabling it to retire 35 Dell servers and make cost savings of £15,000 a year

Law firm TWM Solicitors is reaping the rewards of using Veeam Software to ensure that its IT services are always available, following a switch to a fully virtual infrastructure.

The firm uses a private cloud to deliver virtual desktop services to employees, whether they are in one of TWM's six offices, on-site with a client, or working elsewhere.

Alan Barrett, head of IT at TWM told Computing that when the company moved buildings it looked to refresh its hardware estate. It decided that virtualisation was the way it wanted to go, and selected EMC ahead of alternatives from NetApp and Dell.

TWM deployed EMC's VNX platform, enabling it to retire 35 Dell servers and make cost savings of £15,000 a year in power and cooling.

"EMC engaged with us incredibly well, and we were keen to work with them on the legal vertical and as a consequence we did the migration. The benefit of the migration was that we could replicate our data at our other site without relying heavily on physical hardware," Barrett said.

But the law firm needed a virtual server back-up solution.

Barrett said that previously if the firm had a disaster, it would have to try to recreate an environment that he had spent years tweaking, and this meant that he could never really re-create it.

"The benefit of using hypervisors is that you are divorced from physical hardware, so we could recover systems very quickly and replicate them to another site if we had any major computing issue with our main site," he explained.

TWM looked at the available products that would enable the company to recover their systems, and it was advised by its consultancy to look at the Veeam product.

"It really was perfect for what we wanted, so I rolled it out and very quickly it became beneficial for us," said Barrett.

The law firm was running Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) across all of its sites but had an issue with Microsoft when the software giant stopped supporting Internet Explorer upgrades for Windows 2003 Server.

"In this situation you can't just apply patches and upgrade your servers without undergoing thorough testing, so we trialled the [Google] Chrome app, but our RDP server build was very complex, and Chrome was causing more problems that it was solving," Barrett explained.

As the company was using Veeam's back-up solution, Barrett was able to go back to ‘day 26' on the back-ups.

"There are no actual changes on the RDP server apart from your configuration settings, so we restored the perfect version of it prior to the Chrome installation, whereas before I would have had to rebuild it with all of the registry tools, and apply all of the group policies - it would have taken me days, but it took only 15 minutes," he said.

"That freed me up to build servers, and that is what my job is to drive the business forwards," he said.

Barrett explained that his role can be stressful as the core legal applications that are necessary for TWM are complex and need to work in tandem with each other in order to provide the required level of service and ensure compliance.

"They aren't the easiest applications, and there is a lot of cross-dependency so that if you tune one thing out, then something else can go wrong," Barrett stated.

Using Veeam, the firm can test any updates in a secure virtual lab created from unused back-up infrastructure during the weekend or at other off-peak times.

"If I try an upgrade on the weekend and it doesn't work, I can roll it back using the Veeam product," said Barrett.