Katten Muchin Rosenman Leverages Essentals to Speed VDI Performance
Founded in 1974 with 24 attorneys all based in Chicago, Katten, Muchin, Rosenman, LLC now has nearly 700 attorneys located across London, Shanghai and 11 US cities. The firm’s philosophy continues to be focused on the principles that guided the firm’s founding: a desire to be nimble, strategic, creative and client-centric. Katten has a VMware Horizon VDI infrastructure primarily used for remote access for staff, contractors, an after-hours help desk, outsourced word processing operations and contracted attorneys. Prior to deploying Liquidware solutions, Katten provided individual VDI-hosted machines to each attorney and other professionals.
VMware management tools provided some information on performance and connectivity issues, but the firm's IT staff still lacked a good management solution for troubleshooting. They needed a solution that would provide monitoring and detailed metrics for diagnostics. They chose Liquidware's Stratusphere UX based on its in-depth metrics, and it has become a third-level diagnostics-support solution. When Katten's engineers get troubleshooting calls, they leverage Stratusphere UX to see what’s going on with the VDI machines and infrastructure. The solution has also become an important tool to verify that the equipment they provide is continuing to perform well with the OS and apps loaded on it and provides a good user experience. This confidence is extremely important in light of the fact that the firm rigorously keeps up with Windows 10 version upgrades. Liquidware's track record for early support for Windows OS releases is also a major advantage for the organization.
In addition, the firm is utilizing FlexApp application layering, ProfileUnity and ProfileDisk with VHDs on Flash storage. Katten's IT staff finds these solutions are yielding really great performance, particularly with iManage, their document management system.
Katten has managed to reduce its pool of VMs which it is required to support from 1200 to about 300 machines running at any given time, which is much easier to manage. They have reduced login times down to about 28 seconds, mainly because ProfileUnity is much better at handling Microsoft Group Policy Preferences than their previous VDI setup. The advantages of using the Liquidware Essentials solution set span the spectrum from applications managemen to Windows OS support, reducing the time it takes to administrate the VDI estate.
