Clifford Chance

Story Details

Clifford Chance is one of the world’s leading law firms. And though the firm continued to grow, its mission-critical global practice management system (GPMS) had stalled. Based on Oracle E-Business Suite Financials running the Oracle 10g database and an industry-specific application from Keystone Software, the GPMS helped Clifford Chance manage the billing cycle of its lawyers worldwide. Although the system performed well initially, it was struggling to meet the growing demand for its services. Hisham Anis, enterprise architect at Clifford Chance, says, “For the first few years it provided value, but after that it was beginning to hold back the business.”

In late 2007, the law firm began looking at several options for improving performance of the GPMS solution, Clifford Chance was already implementing another application on infrastructure from Sun Microsystems and was impressed with the solution’s performance and the level of support Sun provided.

The law firm decided it wanted similar advantages for its GPMS solution, and it saw the benefits of standardizing on Sun servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. Moving forward, Clifford Chance knew it could reduce cost and management complexity by migrating applications running on multiple UNIX-based platforms to the Solaris 10 OS. It also planned to consolidate its datacenters worldwide and realized that Sun servers with their multi-threaded processors, would provide the performance, scalability, and virtualization technologies needed for the project. Clifford Chance plans to take advantage of Solaris Containers and Dynamic Domains for their inherent virtualization benefits. The firm will also benefit from the DTrace feature in the Solaris OS, which enables maximum resource utilization and application performance on its Sun servers.

Clifford Chance performed a proof of concept in May 2008 using a Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 server provided by Sun partner Hamilton Rentals. Satisfied with the results, Clifford Chance decided to run the GPMS on high-performing Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 servers with SPARC64 VII quad-core processors in its main datacenter in London and in its disaster recovery site near Frankfurt, Germany. It chose three Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 servers for its application tier at both sites and aSun SPARC Enterprise M5000 server to run in its development and test environment. The Sun Application Readiness Service accelerated deployment by fine-tuning the infrastructure design and implementation strategy, and Sun partner Fujitsu acquired and shipped the hardware to the datacenters in England and Germany.

Clifford Chance expects to complete deployment in early 2009 and has high expectations for the upgrade. Based on tests run with a sample base of concurrent users, it expects that the new enterprise servers’ high throughput and multi-threaded processors will more than double the GPMS performance capacity and application speed. The law firm anticipates a boost in employee productivity and more business wins as a result. The solution will also improve energy efficiency, a top priority at Clifford Chance. Once the firm completes its deployment, it anticipates a significant reduction in carbon footprint.

Additional benefits include a projected full ROI on hardware costs within two years. Clifford Chance also expects to cut costs significantly when it consolidates 10 global datacenters into 4, which reduced datacenter space by approximately 60%. By taking advantage of Sun systems’ inherent scalability and virtualization technologies, Clifford Chance plans to reduce the number of physical servers it supports by approximately 90%.