Virtual reality gamble for Mallesons

International law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques has committed to a "virtual future" after it recovered the AU$300,000 spent on a virtualisation project three months before the rollout was complete.

Faced with rising datacentre costs, the Australian-based company adopted VMware's ESX Server 2.5.3 to virtualise 140 of its 290 servers required to run its local and international operations.

Mallesons employs 2,100 staff across its five offices in Australia, London, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

"Our procurement costs were by far offset by the savings we made by removing so many hardware costs and saving datacentre space," said Steve Behringer, Mallesons' server and network infrastructure manager.

"We started seeing the benefits of virtualising our servers almost instantly ... now we plan to only purchase hardware that is VM-compatible which helped us realise even further improvements."

The complete case study can be found at: Mallesons plots virtual future with VMware.