CHALLENGE
Sheppard Mullin had been looking to utilize newer emerging technologies to provide improved technology services to the firm’s attorneys and staff. One of the firm’s most critical applications is an on-premises document management system. “Our attorneys spend a lot of time editing, reading, and writing legal documents.,” noted Lawrence Lozzano, Senior DBA at Sheppard Mullin. “Whenever there’s a performance issue with our document management system, it impacts our ability to serve clients effectively. That system must be up 100% of the time.” When it came time to refresh the IT environment, Sheppard Mullin started reviewing some of the newer infrastructure options. “We were looking for the ‘most advanced technology to meet our upgrade needs. Hyperconverged is the hottest thing in the market right now, so we decided to run a POC on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.”
SOLUTION
Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Systems After the highly successful POC, Sheppard Mullin purchased a Nutanix NX-3000 and an NX-8000 series system for its primary datacenter, and an additional 3000-series system for the firm’s secondary data center. Both of those clusters are running the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. Sheppard Mullin also purchased a Nutanix NX-1365 three-node cluster for Files and is using AHV, the Nutanix virtualization solution, on that cluster. They are using encrypted disks on the NX-1365 cluster for HIPAA compliance.
Why Files?
Nutanix Files is an enterprise grade fileserver that is 100% software and is simple, scalable, and elastic, demonstrating Nutanix’s vision for the enterprise cloud. Files was designed to address a wide range of SMB/CIFS use cases, including Windows user profiles, home directories, and departmental shares. “With Windows File Server, you need to set up Windows clustering in order to get a highly available fileserver,” noted Lozzano. Setting up and managing Files is very straightforward. Plus, the 1-click upgrade process makes it very easy to manage going forward.”
RESULTS
Better Performance and Higher Uptime Although Sheppard Mullin originally chose Nutanix to improve system uptime, they are seeing the added benefit of increased performance. “Our Nutanix blocks can go up to 100,000 IOPS,” noted Lozzano. “That’s more IOPS than we’ll ever need, but it’s nice to know that performance should never be an issue for our tier-1 applications.” “Nutanix is providing near 100% uptime, enabling us to more easily meet our SLAs. With Nutanix, our attorneys can be more efficient with their caseloads, providing better service to all of our global clients,” Lozzano said.
Read the full White Paper here.