Read the following case studies that are dedicated to sustainability in virtualization.
eLinia provides hosting solutions to large organizations—from government agencies to tier one banks—that need total security. One of its services, Secure Exchange, is used to securely transfer files. In 2007, the company began hosting the application with the Windows Server® 2008 operating system. Now, Secure Exchange is even more robust, improving customer experience. And virtualization reduces the company’s carbon footprint.
The SCOOTER Store consolidated and reduced the number of servers in its IT environment. As a result, the company saves between US$150,000 and US$200,000 in IT hardware costs. And it is increasing its return on investment by 50 percent. "We have 13 physical servers doing what 52 servers used to do," says Barrett Blake, Infrastructure Architect at the Scooter Store. "We’re talking about saving $150,000 worth of physical hardware and that doesn’t include the power requirements for them."
Sporton Labs implemented Hyper-V to consolidate workloads efficiently on single servers. The company now gets more value out of its hardware resources. And the Sporton IT department can support the business with less hardware, which results in lower equipment costs, reduced electrical consumption, and more space in the data center. "Since deploying Hyper-V, we have reduced hardware requirements by a one-to-seven ratio, saving more than 70 percent of our hardware costs," says Kathy Lin IT Manager, Sporton International. "We’ve increased server utilization from 10 to 15 percent to more than 70 percent because a single quad-core server running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V can host as many as seven virtual servers."
After Quad/Graphics virtualized its servers, the company was able to remove 75 physical servers from its infrastructure and eliminate the need to purchase 75 additional physical servers. This saved 25 percent in hardware costs and even more in data center infrastructure costs, such as network switches, racks, fan switchboards, and cable. "We realized major cost avoidance benefits with Virtual Server. Not only did we save money that previously was spent equipping, managing, and powering the data center, we have so much extra space now," says Damian Drewek, IS-Director of Technical Services, Quad/Graphics.
RBA saved US$30,000 on hardware costs. When the company created the 12 virtual machines (VMs) for the servers that ran the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise, it used its Virtual Server host clustering solution to free space on 10 physical servers. The VMs have also helped RBA reduce the electrical consumption costs for servers and air conditioners in the data center by 50 percent.
