Europcar Car Hire Company Achieves Return on Investment in Days with Virtualisation Solution

Europcar is Europe’s leading car rental company, with a worldwide network of 13,000 service outlets. In Finland, the Europcar licence is held by Interrent Oy, which offers 75 separate rental outlets in 35 locations. Here, the organisation’s existing data centre could not keep up with the company’s expansion. It lacked speed and agility, and its limited capacity led to performance issues, which restricted employees and affected customer service. The company also had to add a server for every new application deployed, which was an expensive and time-consuming process. Europcar needed to find a solution that:

• Ensured the business could scale its infrastructure quickly and cost effectively

• Offered fast migration to minimise business impact

• Reduced administration and maintenance

Europcar struggled to find a suitable solution until Microsoft Gold Certified Partner PCP Partner suggested deploying the Windows Server 2008 operating system with Hyper-V virtualisation technology. The business was concerned that moving to a virtualised environment would be a lengthy process, but using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which easily consolidates multiple physical servers onto virtual hosts, the team migrated the organisation’s infrastructure quickly and efficiently. Europcar found:

• All hardware could be migrated at once, rather than server by server

• Its systems ran instantly on the new platform

Virtualisation of the data centre took just six days, and the project achieved return on investment within six days of the solution going live.

• Europcar has halved the number of physical servers supporting the business.

• The new data centre is cooled more efficiently, reducing electricity costs.

• Data-centre performance is significantly enhanced.

• More disk space and reliable backup technology ensure applications work longer and require less maintenance.

• The business has cut the need for replacing or buying additional hardware.

• Customers benefit from faster service.

• The solution will scale to support customer growth and the development of new services and applications.