Virtualization Case Study
The Client:
A Fortune 500 energy company based in the Southwest US and recognized throughout the industry as a leader in the refinement and production of premium, environmentally clean products. With more than 5,500 retail and wholesale outlets across the Western hemisphere their business is growing rapidly.
The Challenge:
In order to support the ongoing needs of the business, the Technical Services team was struggling with the exponential growth of x86 servers in the datacenter. The increasing need for new space, power, cooling and server management was quickly becoming unmanageable.The SOLUTIONS II Solution:
We applied our process of discovery, design, deployment and documentation to help facilitate containment of their growth of physical servers. The Technical Services Project Manager engaged our organization in a containment study that resulted in developing a plan which reduced server growth from a projected 250 servers to 11 physical servers. This resulted in lower power and cooling costs and significantly less server management effort. It also resulted in not purchasing over 200 new servers which significantly increased their available budget. More importantly, it also postponed the need for a new data center.
The second phase was to evaluate their current infrastructure for simple servers to consolidate and our teams were able to develop a plan to remove another 100 servers, which has resulted in lower management costs of over 20%.