Green Data Centre Revolution

The Customer

With over 200 Partners and staff, Forsters is one of the leading names in the legal profession encompassing property, private clients, corporate and litigation. With one eye on expansion, the legal practice has managed to grow in a sustainable way.

The green agenda is increasingly at the forefront of today’s business thinking. Carbon offsetting and carbon footprints are phrases that have slipped into everyday vernacular as companies strive to become more energy efficient. In taking advantage of the considerable cost savings that can be made, companies can at the same time do their bit for the environment. Forsters has migrated to a virtualised infrastructure that has delivered substantial reductions in overall power consumption, following a successful implementation and integration by leading solutions providers Intercept.

Based in Mayfair in central London, Forsters provides legal advice to corporate and institutional clients as well as many private individuals. It has consistently focused on delivering high quality client service and as a result has seen its revenues leap by 50% over the last three years. Critical to the Partners is that they take their responsibilities within the wider community seriously, in other words that they grow sustainably. Paul Neville who leads its major sustainability initiative stated: “How we approach our use of resources is an increasingly important part of our long term corporate strategy.”

The Challenge

The challenge that has confronted managers throughout the practice in recent months has been to take that green agenda forward in every part of the organisation. With initiatives in place across all departments, it fell to the IT department to deliver one of the most dramatic and revolutionary changes. Andrew Meade (AJ), IT Manager at Forsters, stated: “The IT department was challenged to deliver substantial power savings, not an easy objective when the company is experiencing tremendous growth with the associated pressures on the existing IT system.” “This objective was matched with the need to improve user performance and make sure that we were able to continue operations in the event of a disaster,” he continued. The answer: migration to a virtualised environment. AJ continued: “There was little doubt in my mind that by moving to a virtual infrastructure we could potentially attain all three objectives. The challenge for me was to find a solutions provider that could deliver.”

The Solution

Forsters recognised that it needed expert help in its migration to a virtual environment. Due diligence and first hand experience led it to Intercept. AJ continued: “Other companies just gave us high level recommendations. What really impressed me about Intercept was its first hand knowledge of the technology we required and its real world experience in delivering solutions.”

With over 22 servers covering file, print and Exchange amongst others, Intercept was challenged with virtualising the entire infrastructure. The Intercept implementation included the upgrade of Citrix to Presentation Server (XenApp) 4.5 to deliver improved security and user performance, as well as a new Active Directory structure designed to help with Microsoft Windows and Exchange administration. VMware ESX was installed to virtualise the back end servers alongside Platespin PowerConvert to manage workload migration, which in turn released physical servers for a new high availability disaster recovery site seamlessly integrated with a Falconstor IPStor SAN. AJ stated: “We have no down time today. For an organisation of our size we had a large server farm with high power consumption. Intercept has delivered a robust infrastructure which has not only saved us considerable amounts of money and reduced our overall carbon footprint, it has delivered zero downtime – the ideal business continuity solution.

The Benefits

As a result of Intercept, Forsters now has reduced its power consumption and carbon footprint through a new virtualised highly available system which has:


AJ added: “It was critical that we had a system that ran reliably to enable the legal teams to collaborate, deliver outstanding results and to maintain a competitive advantage. With a robust solution now in place thanks to the work undertaken by the Intercept team, we have an environment that can be scaled effortlessly for future needs whilst ensuring we keep a close eye on our energy bills!”

“We always competitively tender for any large project, but on every occasion Intercept has won our business, and I can see that happening in the future. Both the account team and the consultants know our business and understand the IT environment from the inside out,” concluded AJ.