Ropes & Gray Uses Akorri BalancePoint for Proactive Management of Virtualized Data Center

Ropes & Gray is a leading national law firm with offices in Boston, New York, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Washington, DC and a conference center in London. Built on a foundation of over 140 years of dedication to forging strong client relationships, the firm represents interests across a broad spectrum of industries in corporate law and litigation matters.  In addition, they offer counsel on labor and employment issues, tax and benefits, creditors' rights, and private client services.  Clients range in size from large to small companies and include financial institutions, government agencies, hospitals and health care organizations, colleges and universities, and families and individuals. Over 850 lawyers and professionals strive to provide the highest-quality legal advice available.

CHALLENGE: Virtualized Infrastructure is More Complex to Manage

Soon after Ropes & Gray began consolidating applications onto virtual servers two and a half years ago, Senior Infrastructure Architect Craig Dodson realized the company needed more advanced management capabilities. Dodson needed a tool that could identify and fix problems as well as monitor and improve performance across not only the physical IT environment but also the virtual infrastructure.

Ropes & Gray’s virtual servers are located within 15 physical servers that are part of five data centers across the U.S. and abroad supporting 2,200 users. The 15 physical servers play host to approximately 300 virtual servers. The organization had converted more than 90% of its systems into virtual environments using VMware’s ESX virtual server technology.

Ropes & Gray needed to manage performance and resource utilization as they scaled up their virtual environment. However, virtualized data centers, with virtual servers and storage, add a level of complexity to management as physical infrastructure is separated from functional logic and the traditional relationships between physical server, network, and storage components are broken, leaving traditional systems management solutions lacking in capability.

“Virtualization adds a couple of layers, and without these types of tools, it’s difficult to keep an eye on things to make sure they are working the way that they should,” said Dodson.

Examples of specific issues were that Ropes & Gray was unable to determine the cause of intermittent performance problems within its VMware environment, as VMware’s Virtual Center management solution indicated that CPU/RAM metrics weren’t a problem. Also, Ropes & Gray’s time-tracking application had a sluggish response time and they hadn’t been able to determine the route cause.

SOLUTION: Akorri BalancePoint Monitors and Manages Virtual Infrastructure

BalancePoint provided the analysis and troubleshooting for Ropes & Gray's virtual infrastructure including virtual servers running on VMware’s ESX virtual server technology supported by EMC's CLARiiON storage.

RESULTS: Proactive Problem Solving, Data Center Management and Optimization

Less than two days after installing BalancePoint, Ropes & Gray was able to fully manage its five data centers by solving its performance issues, proactively avoiding future performance issues and enabling long-term planning of resource consumption.

BalancePoint identified the VMware intermittent performance issue as I/O contention at the level of the RAID set, and showed that two SQL servers sharing the RAID set with the VMware environment were causing contention. BalancePoint recommended where to move the SQL server LUNs, and sure enough this recommendation solved the problem.

Also, BalancePoint quickly traced the time-tracking application’s sluggish response time to storage hardware. “We’d been digging through all of the different layers, the application layer, the database layer, trying to figure out where the bottleneck was,” said Dodson. BalancePoint was able to quickly trace the problem to the storage hardware. BalancePoint’s mapping functionality and bottleneck detection immediately highlighted the problem. It showed us that we had too much I/O [activity] on the physical disks,” said Dodson. “The time-tracking application is very write-intensive, and it needed faster access to the disks. Once we migrated the database to a faster set of disks, the problem went away.”

In a nutshell, according to Dodson, “BalancePoint was able to immediately provide us deep, meaningful analysis of what was happening throughout our data centers and help us create more complete control of our VMware environments. We are thrilled to be proactively managing and optimizing application and infrastructure performance now through BalancePoint.”

Ropes & Gray currently plans to upgrade to BalancePoint 2.0, which offers the solution in a virtual appliance, and adds a performance index, scorecard reporting and storage virtualization support.

Dodson welcomes the upgrade, as his firm is in the process of moving all servers from the existing data centers to a single co-location facility he will manage remotely from Boston.

“For big customers such as us, with a VMware server farm, we won’t have to have another white box sitting in a rack that we have to worry about managing. I will gradually transition from the hardware appliance to the virtual appliance,” says Dodson. “I’ll implement the new version in the midst of the consolidation, so we’ll have it monitoring the data center from the moment it’s turned on.”