Chace needed to rebuild the infrastructure from the ground up.
“The integrators from mindSHIFT said, ‘We’d much rather that you go with HP because it plays nicely with other equipment, it’s a trusted resource and it’s tried and true,’” Chace says.
“We recommended and implemented HP at Burns & Levinson because we believe that HP is a very dependable system for law firms,” says Matthew Fredette, managing director of mindSHIFT. “Systems reliability and uptime is more critical than ever for today's legal professionals. In the past ten years, we have found HP to be a reliable hardware solution for application services typically used in law firms.”
Chace and his team selected HP ProLiant servers and Cisco switches and routers. They created an Active Directory infrastructure to make licensing easier, added HP printers and updated the remote access solution so attorneys could work from home and use their Blackberries to access office email. Desktop configuration takes one minute instead of four hours. The firm plans to update its accounting system in 2008 on HP servers.
As a result of the overhaul, the firm is experiencing greatly improved server performance. System and server crashes used to occur two to three times per week, but the new network reliability provides 24/7 uptime, putting a stop to lost billable hours due to server failures and freeing up IT personnel to continue with their normal jobs.
“We felt a sense of relief when the new server configuration was installed and operating,” says Chace. But the real benefit is to the bottom line, Chace says, because attorneys can provide better value to clients.
“I could never do this without the right foundation,” Chace says. “Being able to expand HP storage easily has been great, especially when attorneys hand us 26 DVDs containing a terabyte of data and expect us to simply move the data to the firm’s servers.”
Chace says a can-do attitude is necessary for the firm's profitability, and the technology finally makes it possible.
|
Druckversion
