For Rich Raether, information technology operations at the law firm Quarles & Brady LLP, virtualization has few downsides.
The firm, which has eight offices worldwide, first turned to virtualization six years ago. And where is it now?
“Today we are over 80% virtualized,” Raether said in a YouTube video taken at the Dell booth at VMWorld 2011.
And the platform’s success convinced Raether to go even further to better serve the end users remotely accessing the virtualized desktops – in this case, attorneys. Of the law firm’s 1,000 employees, he estimated that about 50 users operate on a virtual desktop infrastructure exclusively day in and day out.
One of the key benefits has been the time it takes to provision a desktop in a virtualized environment: The time dropped from seven minutes to just 30 seconds.
One big issue in virtualization, which already has had a far-reaching impact on IT and office environments, is storage. Imagine the amount of data that a law firm the size of Quarles & Brady generates. And it all has to reside – securely – somewhere.
“The need for storage and demand for storage is exploding, and the amount of data in our environment continues to grow,” Raether said.
And a key area of demand is the ability to modularize said storage. That’s going to be the big selling point for virtualization, as it has been for customers like Quarles & Brady.
“From an IT perspective, we are going to continue rolling out VDI. Our hope is to really give our attorneys access anywhere, anytime, from any platform,” Raether said.
To read a related virtualization success story, check out Dell Tech Center’s Lee Burnette’s blog post about his YouTube interview with Barry Blakeley, the infrastructure architect for Mazda‘s North American operations.