When one of Australia’s top law firms, Deacons, wanted to centralise its IT infrastructure for lower costs, better network performance and a reduced carbon footprint, Nextgen Networks’ VPLS ethernet VPN solution provided the bandwidth, flexibility and self-management features it was looking for. Deacons’ network spans Australia and Asia and it has over 1000 staff.
The objective was to provide unified communications over a self-managed, high-speed network and consolidate IT infrastructure for better performance, operational efficiencies and reduced carbon footprint.
Deacons’ IT department provides a range of services that are increasingly critical to the operating processes of legal staff including unified communications, voice over IP (VoIP), videoconferencing and remote access where reliable, flexible high-speed data carriage is required.
The practice of law, like most industries, has seen exponential increases in the volume of data managed and used in day-to-day business processes. Core applications such as practice management, document management and communications are now totally reliant on staff and external clients being able to quickly and reliably access large amounts of data from anywhere in Australia or elsewhere in the world.
According to Andrew Pritchett, Deacons’ Infrastructure Manager, Information Technology, the main challenge is to provide uninhibited, authenticated access to its systems for all of its internal and external clients.
“We aim to provide unified communications with high-speed, remote access and to consolidate our infrastructure so we can manage it more effectively,” Pritchett said. “At the same time, it is now a declared corporate value of Deacons to reduce and minimise our carbon footprint.
“We were previously using Nextgen’s point-to-point fibre connections but, as our needs changed, we required greater resilience across our entire WAN to improve service to internal and external clients.”
Deacons has transformed its data service delivery process by centralising its server infrastructure into Melbourne. A key component of this strategy was to upgrade its high-speed data service with Nextgen Networks.
A 200 Mbps link now connects Deacons’ Melbourne office to Nextgen’s national fibre-optic network, which is the third largest fibre network in Australia. Deacons also utilises Nextgen’s VPLS ethernet VPN service which provides a fully meshed, secure, full-featured ethernet network that connects all customer sites nationally.
Effectively, with a 100 Mbps link from Nextgen’s fibre network to the Sydney office and 40 Mbps links to Brisbane, Canberra and Perth, the VPLS service connects all of Deacons’ five sites into a single wide area network with Layer 2 features such as self-management and end-to-end quality of service (QoS).
“Nextgen were able to provide all the fibre tails into our offices and the migration from our old point-to-point service went very smoothly,” Pritchett said. “It is mainly our data tracking that we now run on the VPLS. Having a centralised infrastructure means that our data tracking through Melbourne is quite high.
“We need this very reliable, high-speed VPN set-up because remotely accessing multiple large documents and responding to emails are critical to the way our legal staff need to operate. We have well over 10 million documents within the document management system that are accessible from anywhere on the network, so the scale of the implementation for our centralised infrastructure was huge.
“We wanted a faster data service with a simpler configuration that would also allow us to self-manage quality of service as well as provide complete interoperability with our other systems. Basically, we didn’t want to require involvement from the carrier in the day-to-day management of our long-haul data network.”
According to Pritchett, upgrading its point-to-point data services to the VPLS service has been a key facilitator to Deacons’ centralising its IT infrastructure. Access to the high-speed long-haul fibre network has helped to decommission 100 servers across the country with no negative impact.
“I think that one of the key features of Nextgen was their ability to work closely with other partners to help us effect a massive transformation in the way we manage our data and make it available to legal staff and external clients,” Pritchett said. “VPLS is just a component of that whole project but it is quite a big component.”
Nextgen Networks worked closely with systems integration experts Getronics to complete the network configuration. It now manages core business applications centrally and distributes data on demand for all Deacons’ practice management, document management, email and internet. There is also sufficient bandwidth to use as a back-up network for VoIP and videoconferencing.
“We have significantly quicker response times than on the point-to-point system. In particular, we saw a significant increase between our Perth and Melbourne traffic speed. Now there is not much difference between Perth to Melbourne and Sydney to Melbourne.
“The technical expertise provided by Nextgen was exceptional and the speed of implementation exceeded the project’s deadlines,” Pritchett said. “They were very easy to work with and that’s a really positive thing. They were very flexible, very open and transparent. They let us know exactly what we needed to know when we needed to know it.”
“As a Layer 2 technology, VPLS provides us with simplified routing configuration, full internal control and complete transparency of what is happening across the network instead of relying on the telco.”
Tangible bottom line benefits that could be directly attributed to Nextgen’s VPLS service include reduced data carriage costs, a better performing network and complete flexibility in self-managing configurations.
“Nextgen proved to be exceptional value based on price alone and were by far the most competitive of all the carriers we spoke to,” Pritchett said.
As at 1 January 2010, Deacons will become part of the global Norton Rose Group.