Success Story Thomson Reuters Unleashes New Products with a Shared IT Infrastructure Built on NetApp “NetApp helped us put in place a rock- solid infrastructure that allowed us to dream big... and to deliver a service that is changing the way law firms do business.”
Cary Felbab Vice President, Technology, Thomson Reuters Professional Division
Customer Profile Professional Division, says a lot of data KEY HIGHLIGHTS Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading and the ability to access it intelligently, Industry source of intelligent information for quickly, and affordably: “We use a lot Media/business services businesses and professionals. The of storage—in fact, 16 petabytes of company combines industry expertise information is stored worldwide. But The Challenge with innovative technology to deliver the data on that storage gains value only Shrink IT spend while building agile, when our customers can find what they efficient infrastructure to deliver critical information to leading decision need, when they need it, and have con- industry-changing legal research makers in the financial, legal, tax and fidence in the results. So the second solutions. accounting, scientific, healthcare,science , and media markets, powered by the half of the equation is sophisticated The Solution world’s most trusted news organization. applications and search tools. To design Implement a shared IT infrastructure Headquartered in New York, with major and deliver those, we require a robust ® and cloud foundation on NetApp operations in London, England, and shared IT infrastructure, one that’s for game-changing innovation. Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters flexible, scalable, and available to our Benefits employs some 55,000 people in product developers every day, hour, • Launch WestlawNext you-centric more than 100 countries and reports and minute of the year. NetApp is one of legal research system revenues of US$13.1 billion (2010). the companies that we’ve come to rely • Enable non-literal searches (Source: www.thomsonreuters.com) on for our storage needs and to enable of 5 billion documents the dynamic IT infrastructure that is vital • Search 50x more data with The Challenge to game-changing innovation.” 2x faster results At Thomson Reuters, it’s all about the • Speed time to market with “Knowledge Effect”—that is, putting the Across the organization today, automated cloud testing right information into the right hands Thomson Reuters uses NetApp storage • Deliver 24/7/365 service availability to help clients produce amazing results. to support a wide array of business • Avoid $65M in new data center And just what does it take to deliver systems and research platforms. costs the Knowledge Effect? Rick King, chief The Thomson Reuters shared IT • Use 25% less power technology officer for the company’s infrastructure and cloud are built “By eliminating older, inefficient technologies of existing resources via the shared IT infrastructure with NetApp storage, we avoided building a new two-megawatt data center at an estimated cost of $65 million. Most importantly, we’re spending our money on expanding the business rather than growing a technology footprint.” Rick King Chief Technology Officer, Thomson Reuters Professional Division
on NetApp storage, the VMware® Professional Division. “NetApp worked The Thomson Reuters team emphasizes vSphere™ virtualization platform, and with us throughout the product devel- that NetApp storage is an important Cisco® networking switches. This opment process to profile environments, element in a highly innovative tech infrastructure provides a scalable and identify capabilities and constraints, nology stack. Inherent reliability and multi-use foundation for Oracle®-based and recommend best practices to help replication technologies help achieve content and metadata systems for us achieve product strategies.” availability targets and efficiencies from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw legal deduplication and compression enable research service that is used by 98% Blair Linville, head, Shared Infrastruc- expansion of content sets without of the largest firms in the United States. ture and Operations, Thomson Reuters requiring budget-crippling upfront Professional Division, adds, “NetApp capital investments. Shared storage A major enhancement to the Westlaw storage gives us tremendous flexibility improves both resource utilization service was one of the most recent—and for scaling and provisioning resources and economic viability. “infrastructure-challenging”—projects to pursue new ideas. If a concept to leverage the Thomson Reuters and doesn’t pan out, we can just as easily Business Benefits NetApp partnership. King comments, redeploy capacity to support alternative Functionality indistinguishable “Our strategy for WestlawNext was to efforts.” from magic engineer a premium product that would The WestlawNext you-centric legal make doing a legal search as easy as Rapid resource deployment, agile research system, launched in 2010 doing an Internet search. For that, we software development principles, and named by the American Association needed to store and search even more and automated cloud-based testing of Law Libraries as its New Product data, return results faster, and develop contributed to an on-time and on-budget of the Year for 2011, delivers break- a human-centric interface.” project launch. Cary Felbab, vice through research capabilities. High- president, Technology, Thomson Reuters lights include: The Solution Professional Division, remarks, “At times Scaling out its existing shared IT it seemed like we were bending the • Enhanced search. WestlawNext infrastructure gave Thomson Reuters a laws of physics to meet project sched- enables non-literal searches on jumpstart on the project, enabling rapid ules and accelerate time to market. One some 5 billion documents from deployment of resources to engineering key to our success was setting up auto- heterogeneous sources. Advanced teams developing the WestlawNext mated scale testing using our private search algorithms deliver responses back-end search dynamic, as well as cloud infrastructure—the same one our in an average time of 2.5 seconds— front-end applications for enhanced business users access during the day— twice as fast as product developers’ accessibility and usability. “Our infra- to simulate real clients hitting the system original target—with consistently structure strategy for WestlawNext from the Internet. Every night we ran on‑point information, typically within required dramatically scaling shared multi-thousand-user tests to measure the first 10 documents returned on storage,” says Mick Atton, vice president performance. Leveraging cloud-based a search request. and chief architect, Thomson Reuters services let us do more testing faster and with fewer IT resources.” “With good technology and good collaborators, we’re better able to develop premium products and deliver on our promise of the Knowledge Effect. At this level of innovation, it seems an understatement to say we introduce new products. More appropriate would be ‘We unleash them.’” Rick King Chief Technology Officer, Thomson Reuters Professional Division
• Organization tools—Clients can Felbab points out that the Thomson event of a server failure. NetApp NFS easily create and share folders, add Reuters infrastructure directly contributes performance is also essential to being notes and highlights to documents, to the magic: “NetApp NFS performance able to rapidly retrieve search indexes and take advantage of other time- and on-the-fly scalability allow us, for if a refresh of cached data is required. saving features to better organize example, to search on a significantly ® legal research. larger body of content, as well as to NetApp Snapshot and the replication seamlessly handle the unpredictable software that builds on it—including ® • Simplicity. Thomson Reuters experts workloads of a new launch. In just the NetApp SnapRestore technology—are in artificial intelligence, data mining, first year, we scaled to bring on some other tools that are heavily leveraged. machine learning, and natural lan- 6,000 new users, exceeding our first- These technologies allow Thomson guage processing helped design the year adoption forecast by 50%.” Reuters to quickly—in seconds, not simple yet powerful interface. With its minutes—roll back to a consistent human-centric focus and single-box Dial-tone availability state when needed. search field, WestlawNext offers a “This system has worked flawlessly,” Innovation made affordable clean, uncluttered dashboard from states Felbab. “In many cases our clients which to work. are working to court deadlines, so they Building WestlawNext on the shared rely on 24/7 access to WestlawNext IT infrastructure and cloud has helped “The original Westlaw was hands down services. The replication processes Thomson Reuters achieve efficiencies the dominant product in the market,” NetApp helped us architect enable us essential to the economic viability maintains Felbab. “But good compa- to meet or exceed our 99.99% uptime of the new service. King highlights nies don’t sit still, so with WestlawNext target to deliver dial-tone availability.” savings in: we set out to search 50 times more data and return results twice as fast. Unlike Internet searches, a WestlawNext • Administration. By standardizing We’ve achieved those objectives and search must be absolutely accurate. on server, storage, and other infra- more, solving problems that were not If a system fails, Thomson Reuters can’t structure technologies, IT staff possible to tackle just 5 years ago. temporarily substitute older or alterna- spends less time becoming experts And we’re making it easier than ever tive content. So to ensure complete on a myriad of platforms. Instead, for users to find information. But that accuracy, a reliable, redundant infra- they’re able to focus on most simplicity belies the magic going on structure and NetApp shared storage effectively applying well-understood behind the scenes. For every customer were deployed that allow Thomson functionality to meet technical search, the WestlawNext engine does Reuters to quickly repoint a replace- and business needs. 15 in the background. We’re delivering ment server to content stores in the in seconds or minutes what manual research processes could only produce in 2 or 3 hours.” • Data center costs. “The virtualiza- Felbab comments, “For the first time SOLUTION COMPONENTS tion process has cut 20–25% off our ever, we’re seeing emotional reactions power consumption,” states King. to a product. NetApp helped us put in NetApp Products “Last year, negative power growth place a rock-solid infrastructure that NetApp FAS6000, FAS3000, actually allowed us to return signifi- allowed us to dream big, to tackle and FAS2000 platforms cant savings to the company. By ambitious goals, and to deliver a NetApp Flash Cache modules eliminating older, inefficient tech service that is changing the way nologies of existing resources via the law firms do business.” NetApp OnCommand™ software, shared IT infrastructure with NetApp including NetApp Operations Partnering to unleash new products storage, we avoided building a new Manager, Protection Manager, two-megawatt data center at an King concludes by describing the SnapManager ® for Microsoft® estimated cost of $65 million. Most critical role technology partners play SQL Server ®, SnapManager for importantly, we’re spending our in delivering differentiating innovation: Microsoft SharePoint Server ®, money on expanding the business “We use a lot of vendors, but consider SnapManager for Exchange, rather than growing a technology only two providers to be strategic tech- SnapManager for Oracle, footprint. With a traditional infrastruc- nology partners. NetApp is one. If we and SnapManager for Virtual ture, we simply would not have been encounter a problem, it’s fixed. If we tell Infrastructure software them there is going to be a key launch able to deliver on WestlawNext per- NetApp FlexClone®, SnapDrive®, like WestlawNext, they are engaged. formance and capacity objectives at SnapVault ®, NearStore® on FAS, From the first day we started working an affordable price point.” SnapMirror ®, SnapRestore, and with the company, the NetApp team SANscreen® software Will you marry me, WestlawNext? has demonstrated both business To date, some 20,000 law firms, corpo- curiosity and understanding. They’ve NetApp deduplication and rate law departments, and government worked with us to optimize and tune thin provisioning technologies law departments have upgraded to performance, to quickly leverage new Protocols WestlawNext. Current clients include storage functionality. We’ve consistently NetApp NAS (CIFS/NFS) 36% of Am Law 100 law firms, the found NetApp teams to be smart, corporate law departments of 36% creative, hard working, and entrepre- Environment of Fortune 100 companies, and 97% neurial—those characteristics make VMware of ABA-accredited law schools. them map well to our own project SUSE Linux® teams. Customer response has been over- Oracle Database 10g™ and higher whelmingly positive. From praise for “With good technology and good Oracle Real Application Clusters the “search anything” box to reports collaborators, we’re better able to (RAC) of dramatically simplified research develop premium products and deliver Cisco Catalyst 6500 Series and even a marriage proposal, legal on our promise of the Knowledge switches researchers’ feedback suggests Effect. At this level of innovation, it unprecedented appreciation for seems an understatement to say we Cisco Nexus 7000 Series switches the game-changing functionality. introduce new products. More appro- NetApp Global Services priate would be ‘We unleash them.’” Design and Implementation Managed Services Onsite
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