Case Studies

Following a recent drive to acquire and build new facilities, Spanish utility Iberdrola reached its goal of becoming the world’s top producer of wind-generated electricity. However, this period of rapid growth and expansion into global markets has put pressure on the company’s IT department to more efficiently manage its server farms housed in data centers in Madrid and Bilbao. IT managers chose Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. Iberdrola saved up to 80 percent in data center costs, reduced test and deployment cycles to bring applications more quickly into production, simplified the management of its virtualized environment, and improved disaster recovery. Today, the company’s IT department can provide the operational agility required to support Iberdrola’s rapid growth.

In 2007, Continental Airlines was quickly running out of capacity in its Houston, Texas data center. During that same year, Continental had less than eight weeks to redeploy over 100 front-end Web servers to meet the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards for financial data protection. The company’s IT department transitioned to a virtual infrastructure using Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007. With this solution, Continental consolidated servers and deployed and migrated to a new virtual environment. Not only did Continental meet its PCI deadline, it also created the foundation for a unified, centrally-managed virtual data center that will handle future growth, provisions servers in two hours instead of four weeks, enhances the IT department’s ability to adhere to build standards, and saves more than U.S.$2 million.

In business since 1917, today Alecta is the largest occupational pension provider in Sweden. The company’s data center, located at headquarters in Stockholm, houses more than 100 older, underutilized servers. Alecta’s IT staff deployed a Microsoft® virtualization solution to improve hardware utilization, streamline server provisioning, and increase agility in responding to business directives. The team replaced aging machines with servers running the Windows Server® 2003 R2 Datacenter x64 Edition operating system. Taking advantage of the operating system’s unlimited virtualization rights, Alecta has increased the scalability of its virtualized infrastructure. Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, IT staff now can provision servers in an hour instead of a week, providing unprecedented service levels to the organization.

In 2006, faced with rapid growth, Leumi Card needed to expand, optimize, and better manage its server computer resources. YSIDE, a Certified Microsoft® service partner, recommended and helped the company implement Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 to meet Leumi Card’s goals of increasing hardware utilization and enabling IT to more rapidly configure new servers. While Leumi Card benefited greatly from better performance, server consolidation, easier setup of server resources, and cost savings from using Virtual Server–based virtual machines (VMs), it needed a more efficient and centralized way to provision and manage VMs. Leumi Card is using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007 to help centralize management of its entire VM infrastructure, and dramatically speed physical-to-virtual machine conversions and VM provisioning.

Digiturk is the first and only brand on the digital platform in Turkey and operates within Cukurova Group. As of June 2007, it offers premium content through 151 television, radio, and interactive channels, and broadcasts with high-quality digital sound and vision. In 2004, it replaced legacy hardware with Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. While this resulted in many benefits, Digiturk was challenged with managing the virtual infrastructure. Monitoring and creating new virtual machines was time-consuming. It implemented Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager to simplify management and optimize IT investments. Digiturk has cut virtual machine (VM) management tasks by 50 percent, improved disaster recovery by reducing downtime from 30 to 2 minutes, and accelerated VM provisioning and management by using the Virtual Machine Manager self-service portal and image library.

RackForce was the first hosting service provider to bring Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 technology to market. However, with hundreds of customers and an array of server nodes, managing the company’s growing virtual environment was a challenge. Enterprise-ready and easy to administer, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager lets RackForce centralize and vastly improve virtual machine management. The company can streamline server management and maintain an average of four customers to each physical server, rather than the one-to-one ratio previously supported. System Center Virtual Machine Manager enables RackForce to easily identify which servers have capacity for additional workload, and it significantly simplifies physical to virtual machine migrations. RackForce expects to be able to cut maintenance and provisioning time in half with System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

Kroll Factual Data has the largest known deployment of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 in the world—running on more than 1,400 virtual machines. Although the company has realized tremendous benefits from Virtual Server, it needed to find a way to reduce the 100 or more hours required each week to manage the environment. It evaluated Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager with great success. Based on the results, Kroll Factual Data expects to cut its managerial load by 25 to 40 percent when System Center Virtual Machine Manager is fully rolled out. It hopes to increase production-level virtual machines on physical machines by up to 20 percent when it begins using System Center Virtual Machine Manager in conjunction with the virtualization technologies in the upcoming Windows Server 2008 release.