* Law firm uses Packeteer’s iShared systems
When Jackson, Tenn., law firm Rainey, Kizer, Reviere & Bell opened a second office in Memphis, the IT team quickly realized they’d need to do more than double office supplies to ensure attorneys and support staff in Memphis were able to simultaneously work on legal files and enjoy optimum application performance.
Koie Smith, IT administrator at Rainey Kizer in Jackson, says the firm wanted to be able to maintain its 3Mbps fiber link it established between the two locations (which are about 70 miles apart), without having to upgrade to a more expensive 6Mbps or 10Mbps fiber link. But Smith says it also needed to deliver LAN-like performance to employees working in Memphis.
“We were looking for a way to allow our people to work off the same network share,” Smith explains. “We didn’t want to have to pack up hundreds of banker’s boxes worth of files and maintain two copies of everything for the two offices to work together.”
While Smith considered putting a Citrix or terminal server-like deployment in place to enable application and document sharing, he says he knew the type of documents and work the attorneys did would not be well supported in such environments. “Legal-specific applications just don’t work well with in a Citrix or terminal server approach,” he says.
To explain further, Smith says the law firm has millions of Word and WordPerfect documents, high-resolution images and signatures stored in a network share. Essentially Smith says he wanted to allow the branch office to tap that share, with the caveat that when in use by either office employees on either end could only access the documents in a read-only manner.
The company investigated its options and ultimately purchased technology from Tacit Networks, which was acquired by Packeteer earlier this year. Today, Rainey Kizer is deploying Packeteer’s iShared systems. These appliances integrate wide area file services (WAFS) and WAN optimization technologies that accelerate application performance and provide bandwidth-enhancing compression to help customers reduce costs, save time and enable document sharing among locations. To optimize file transfer performance, the iShared system incorporates compression and caching techniques, Packeteer says.
Now file transfers — which could take up to 15 minutes or completely crash a system — perform in a fraction of the time, and end users aren’t aware if they are accessing the files locally or from the other location. “If I blindfolded our branch office users now, they wouldn’t know they’re working remotely,” Smith says.
The investment in Packeteer has enabled the two locations to share files, Smith says, but also helped him get other initiatives under way. The iShared system’s ability to compress and optimize WAN network traffic has also enabled Rainey Kizer to upgrade its phone switch in Jackson to support VoIP telephony in the Memphis office. He can put the firm’s digital dictation streaming system to use in Memphis as well.
“We were trying to get away from setting up the traditional branch office that required a lot systems and some staff there and basically more investment than we thought necessary,” Smith says. “We wanted to be able to share everything 100% and operate the Memphis branch office as though it was simply an extension of the Jackson location.”
