Success Stories

With its attractive stores offering trendy merchandise at affordable prices, Target changed how consumers think about discount shopping. To help Target deliver on its “Expect More. Pay Less.” brand promise, Target chooses reliable, scalable, and cost-effective technology. That’s why the company is deploying Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and its Hyper-V virtualization technology to retire 8,650 servers and implement a two-servers-per-store policy. By 2012, Target’s entire store server infrastructure will be running on Hyper-V, which will support a total of 15,000 virtual machines running mission-critical applications. Target also deployed Microsoft System Center data center solutions to manage more than 300,000 endpoints across its retail network. With its Microsoft Virtualization solution, the company will save millions of dollars in hardware, electrical, and maintenance costs.

Running the nation’s largest freight railroad requires sophisticated technology. Union Pacific wanted to expand the use of virtualization to curb physical server growth and better meet business needs. The railroad had deployed VMware virtualization technology in its data center to reduce server sprawl but decided to switch to the Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter Hyper-V technology to provide a more familiar tool for Windows-trained staff. By using Hyper-V, Union Pacific has been able to extend virtualization to production workloads and aims to virtualize more than 50 percent of its 1,000 Windows-based servers, saving thousands of dollars in the process. The IT staff can more easily manage Hyper-V host servers and ensure higher performance and availability. By meeting new server requests with Hyper-V, the IT staff can respond more quickly to business needs.

In 2007, EmpireCLS Worldwide Chauffeured Services jettisoned its Linux operating system–based IT infrastructure and moved its data center to HP servers running the Windows Server 2008 operating system. In 2010, it upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 to take advantage of improvements in memory management and virtual desktop computing. With its new lean, virtualized data center and desktop environment, EmpireCLS has attained seven-nines server uptime, which is critical in providing top-notch customer service. It has also cut employee support calls by 75 percent, increased IT staff productivity by 35 percent, reduced its server infrastructure by more than 50 percent, and reduced power costs by 33 percent. Employees are happier with the improved reliability and with higher performance of key applications.

The operations and customers of Lifetime Products are spread around the world—making it crucial for company executives to have a way to access and share information for real-time decision making as though they were in the same room. That’s what the company has now, thanks to its use of the virtualization capabilities of Windows Server 2008 R2. With information and applications available anywhere, anytime, employees gain up to an hour a day in increased productivity, total cost of ownership is reduced, and the company gains a competitive advantage in a challenging marketplace.

hi5 Networks is a popular social media site focused on gaming. After six years of customization, the company’s Java code base and Postgres databases were hard to manage, and the company’s data center was packed with servers. To cut costs and increase efficiency, hi5 dropped Linux and moved the site to the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. It used the Hyper-V technology built into Windows Server 2008 to virtualize its data center, consolidating 420 physical servers to 140. This reduced data center costs by a factor of six and gave hi5 more agility in moving the company in new directions. Now, the development staff can deploy new servers in minutes rather than days and has more time to create new gaming services rather than maintaining old code. A big win: outstanding performance on virtual machines under Hyper-V without the expense of so many physical servers.