Mishcon de Reya

Legal and business services organisation Mishcon de Reya needed to modernise its dated legacy infrastructure to ensure reliable compute, storage, back-up and disaster recovery capabilities.

CDW designed and implemented a solution whereby the organisation’s two London data centres were refreshed with new infrastructure that doubled compute and storage performance while reducing the overall data centre footprint.

Mishcon de Reya’s employees are now benefiting from a system that delivers high availability and is sufficiently scalable to handle future expansion without incurring heavy costs.

Mishcon de Reya is a British organisation with offices in London and New York, providing legal and non-legal services to an international community of clients whose challenges are often cross-border, multijurisdictional and complex.

Mishcon de Reya has more than 800 employees, including 450 fee earning members of staff, of which 151 are partners and legal directors, and 52 in the IT team.

As a technology driven organisation with ambitious growth targets, Mishcon de Reya needed an agile, reliable and scalable infrastructure to accelerate its cloud first strategy.

The organisation aims to be at the forefront of digital innovation in the business and legal sectors in which it operates and is already harnessing AI, data analytics and machine learning tools. It also hosts a hub for legal technology start-ups, MDR LAB, within its London headquarters.

However, the organisation’s existing infrastructure was at capacity, nearing the end of its life and time consuming to manage.

Furthermore, it could not be easily scaled to accommodate new services without incurring disproportionate costs. Looking to the future, Mishcon de Reya aims to prioritise access to services and resources on demand and needed a fully updated on-premise system as a foundation while further cloud adoption is rolled out.

Mishcon de Reya’s virtualisation platform for both storage and compute functions, across both the production and disaster recovery data centres, needed to be refreshed to deliver greater capacity and closer alignment with SLAs.

Furthermore, the incumbent back-up solution was unable to cope with increasing demand and overnight back-up was extending into the working day and disrupting services.

In legal services, the storage, management and accessibility of documents is a critical priority. Providing quick access to documents from its iManage Document Management System (DMS) requires a reliable, ultrafast network and data centre infrastructure.

Mishcon de Reya was seeking a broader understanding of current data centre technologies and turned to CDW, which had proven it possessed the expertise and partner network to demonstrate a comprehensive range of potential solutions.

Ned Stevanovski, Head of IT Operations & Security at Mishcon de Reya, said: “We’d worked with CDW on a smaller project, during which they had delivered the quality and professionalism we require. Their expertise proved itself very quickly and the project was completed on time and on budget.”

The imperative was to refresh compute, storage and back-up services at two data centres; the primary site in Docklands and the disaster recovery facility at the organisation’s Africa House headquarters in London.

CDW’s team of Solutions Architects developed a combination of storage, compute, disaster recovery and back up technologies for the two data centre sites.

Overseen by Mishcon de Reya’s Lead Architect, Lalit Makani and his team, the new infrastructure was assembled with the aim of doubling the previous compute and storage performance. This allows rapid expansion while reducing the overall data centre footprint and alleviated pressure on the space available for rack-mounted equipment.

HPE rackmount servers are at the heart of the new infrastructure, along with separate UCS blade technology, while disaster recovery is enabled by HPE Nimble Storage All Flash Arrays and Hybrid iSCSI.

“We were impressed by HPE Nimble Storage when the team came on site to offer their support, and we knew we would benefit from several of its unique features such as InfoSight,” says Ned Stevanovski. VMware’s vSphere was implemented for both its server virtualisation and operations management capabilities.

To improve backup services, CDW implemented a Veeam solution, which offered easy integration with the Nimble elements of the infrastructure. Having designed the solution, CDW managed the installation, testing and full handover of the new infrastructure to Mishcon de Reya’s IT team. CDW also delivered migration services to ensure smooth transition of workloads from the legacy platform.

CDW’s orchestration of multiple partner technologies has equipped Mishcon de Reya with best-of-breed solutions to address all of its compute, storage and back-up needs today, plus the scalability to adapt to changing demands as the organisation moves forward.

The reliability of data protection has been improved and back-up windows have been shortened so they no longer impinge on the working day. Additionally, Mishcon de Reya has reduced its need for physical space and lowered its power consumption.

“CDW provided invaluable support in terms of technology benchmarking, which helped us choose the right products and services,” says Ned Stevanovski. “Following the project, we have immediately seen improvements in speed and ease of management, which enables my team to be more strategic rather than being reactive.”

Mishcon de Reya’s IT team of 52 people, including five infrastructure specialists, are integral to the future of the business. The modernisation of infrastructure has improved availability and performance, facilitating the introduction of new features and functionalities.

By simplifying day to day data centre management, IT Managers, with the support of Chief Technology Officer, Nick West, are focusing on value-adding initiatives rather than maintenance tasks. In particular, the team are now considering the adoption of hybrid cloud services and investigating the available options with advice from CDW.

Lee Hendra, Solutions Director at CDW, said: “The journey towards new infrastructure can be complicated but with the right guidance, the rewards can be huge in terms of business agility. It has been a pleasure to provide such an innovative organisation as Mishcon de Reya with the platform for an exciting future and we will continue to support them as they move forward.”