1. Atlantic Province Lawyers Consolidate 3 Cities with RightFax
& Save on Licenses, Ongoing Maintenance & Labour Costs
Stewart McKelvey Lawyers and
Advocates . . . . Stewart
McKelvey is an innovative, client-
driven law firm committed to
providing the highest quality of
ethical legal services, earning cli-
ents' trust and meeting and striv-
ing to exceed their needs. The firm
invests in its people, technology
and its business to ensure the con-
tinued delivery of quality service
that clients have come to expect
from the firm. Since becoming the
first regional law firm over 20 years
ago, Stewart McKelvey has grown
to become one of the 20 largest
law firms in Canada with more than
220 lawyers in six locations in At-
lantic Canada.
Each day Stewart McKelvey ex-
changes critical and confidential
financial business related legal l
information between attorneys,
clients, branches, courts, and offi-
cials and their client. A large per-
centage of the documentation
that’s passed back and forth be-
tween attorneys, clients, branches,
courts and officials and their cli-
ents is sent via fax, as it is the
most efficient legally recognized
communication method. Infor-
mation is confidential, immediate,
and secure delivery & receipt is of
highest importance.
The Challenge
Stewart McKelvey’s IT Director was
faced with the challenge of a grow-
ing fax server infrastructure with
increased costs for managing Right-
Fax servers in three cities – Halifax
Nova Scotia, St. Johns Newfound-
land and Saint John New Brunswick.
As business continued to grow, the
demand for cost efficiencies with
RightFax escalated. The annual fees
for maintaining the 3 servers, in-
cluding: power, physical premises,
staffing requirements to manage
the servers and ongoing mainte-
nance and support became visible
to the Partners and IT Department.
It was not immediately clear to the
IT Team how to provision the re-
quired services, enable room for
growth, and change the infrastruc-
ture model to a more cost-effective
architecture footprint all with an eye
towards keeping costs lower in the
future.
The IT team was managing 3 physi-
cal RightFax servers that were not
connected to each other, had differ-
ent fax cards, and had no fail over
capacity between any of them. Be-
cause each machine was separate
there was no central management
or delivery of service to the over
200 lawyers in the Atlantic Provinces
of Canada. The IT Team was under
increasing pressure to allocate more
time and resources to strategize on
how to consolidate their 3 physical
server workloads onto a single, vir-
tualized platform that would be
centralized.
The new virtualized system needed
to meet the existing and growing
needs of their business groups while
using less hardware, licenses and
reducing operating costs making
Stewart McKelvey a greener firm to
do business with.
While server count is a plain issue,
the user’s expectations shifted to
demanding the IT Team deliver
more information, services and
technologies to a broadening set of
user constituencies. Users expect
universal access to applications and
information. Stewart McKelvey
found that the duplication of serv-
ers, applications and databases was
not only expensive to maintain but
also made it difficult to utilize their
Company: Stewart McKelvey Lawyers and
Advocates, 1959 Upper Water St. Halifax, Nova
Scotia, Canada. www.stewartmckelvey.com
Industry: Legal Services
Application: Upgrade unsupported RightFax
Business Server 8.7 in 3 cities to a consoli-
dated virtualized single RightFax Enterprise
10.5 server utilizing Fax Over IP and Gate-
ways deployment while retaining historical
Meta data and images after the upgrade.
Challenge: Reduce staff demands and
costs of managing increased fax traffic on
out dated servers that are out of support in
3 cities.
Solution: RightFax Enterprise 10.5, FoIP,
Gateways, configured with existing VoIP
infrastructure, integrate RightFax with
VMware, implementation, technical support
& training services.
Results: Successful upgrade, consolidation,
significant cost reductions, improved man-
agement visibility and control of fax traffic.
PROJECT SUMMARY
Connectis Project Story LEGAL SERVICES
2. resources and information to the maximum
extent possible. Each RightFax server re-
quires a database to track user information,
fax images, in and outbound fax transac-
tions Meta data and DID (Direct Inward Dial)
routing rules information. The RightFax da-
tabase health is key to the continued opera-
tion of each server. Monitoring and manag-
ing three disparate databases, each requir-
ing its own maintenance became challeng-
ing. Stewart McKelvey needed to centralize
the monitoring of all inbound and out-
bound fax jobs at any time from a single
console.
It became difficult to determine how to re-
solve these problems. One server was un-
derutilized; another was over utilized with
frequent busy signals resulting in poor ser-
vice delivery. It was time to replace the an-
nual maintenance costs and fax foot print at
each location with a well thought out solu-
tion going forward.
The Goal
Stewart McKelvey’s choices included: 1)
stay with 3 servers each with physical fax
card and avoid service disruption due to
consolidation, or 2) consolidate the 3 Right-
Fax servers into a single central landing
zone utilizing their existing VoIP infrastruc-
ture for FoIP (Fax over IP) and reduce hard-
ware footprint and recurring annual mainte-
nance and supports costs.
The IT team had many detailed discussions
with Connectis Group discussing alterna-
tives, project timelines, required tools, tech-
nologies and cost avoidance strategies to
eliminate the server sprawl and provide a
consolidated and virtualized architecture.
Stewart McKelvey agreed that server con-
solidation at a single landing zone was their
best option. Connectis provided facts and
figures to the team to enable them to do a
cost-benefit analysis, measure the impacts
to service during the consolidation for their
proposed investment for future growth.
The effect on each business unit and user
group had to be known in advance of mov-
ing forward. Stewart McKelvey examined
their RightFax server licenses, required
modules, fax channel capacities, determine
whether or not the systems were optimally
utilized and calculate recurring annual
maintenance fees.
The Solution
Stewart McKelvey decided to upgrade their
RightFax 8.7 Business Server on to a new
clean build of RightFax 10.5 Enterprise on
VMware utilizing Fax over IP (got rid of the
fax cards) at their main datacenter in Halifax,
effectively providing consolidated services to each location. Right-
Fax Remote Doc Transport servers (no cost) were configured at the
satellite locations to facilitate fax routing. Consolidation was the only
strategy that addressed the database and DID routing issues from a
single platform.
Consolidation requires a plan that addresses business and technolo-
gy, current opportunity, and future requirements. While planning
consolidation Connectis paid detailed attention to their RightFax in-
frastructure, network designs; specification of new processes; a
schedule; and a plan that addressed how the new implementation
will be rolled out and specifics of a contingency scenario. The imple-
mentation plan included physical deployment, training and organiza-
tional issues, data conversion, and a support plan for the new envi-
ronment.
Stewart McKelvey engaged Connectis to provide:
Assist with the planning stage to define consolidation requirements,
cost-benefits considerations, reduced channel count, reduced
maintenance requirements, future requirements
Upgrade planning and deployment of migrating the v8.7 RAMA da-
tabase to the supported MS-SQL, retain fax users and historical fax
images
Architecture design, software and gateway deployment on all 3 loca-
tions during standard and extended hours, and migration guidance
detailing the proposed virtualization solution.
Provide operational guidance to get the best value out of the new
RightFax 10.5 and VM architecture
The Results
Connectis implemented the workload and server consolidation solu-
tion during regular and extended hours to reduce the impact on
Stewart McKelvey staff in each city thereby eliminating the server
sprawl. The single server today is better utilized, ongoing costs are
reduced, systems are more manageable, patches and new versions
only need be applied to a single server and effective service is pro-
vided to each office employee through the companies WAN. Three
servers were reduced to a single machine, reliance on fax cards that
could fail and cost money to annually maintain were completely
eliminated, staffing costs were dramatically reduced by maintaining
a single location. The next planned step for Stewart McKelvey is to
have Connectis provide a highly available RightFax architecture to
eliminate the threat of potential downtime. Stewart McKelvey now
has better control, service continues and the density of fax channels
supports their current needs and potential growth.
The Benefits
Information that weren’t easily accessed and analyzed prior to con-
solidation have now improved
Cost reductions due to virtualization, elimination of fax card hard-
ware, reduce license maintenance, power, and air conditioning. The
total cost of ownership is now dramatically reduced.
Reduced the need for duplicate skill sets in 3 cities.
By integrating the virtualized RightFax with VMware, RightFax can
now be ‘migrated in real time’ to another server for maintenance
without shutting down the primary server – all without impacting the
end user.
Improved efficiency to service capabilities
Consolidated environment is both robust and adaptive to change
