Case Studies

Fpweb.net has been hosting Microsoft® SharePoint® Products and Technologies since 1999. To weather a tough market, the company wanted to hone its competitive advantage by reducing operational costs and passing the savings to customers. It tried a VMware virtualization solution to cut hardware costs but reached the limit of the product’s capabilities. To expand its virtualized environment, Fpweb.net switched to Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™, saving U.S.$100,800 in licensing costs over the VMware option. It has since virtualized 115 servers, avoiding an increase in data center rental costs of $180,000 a year and raising IT worker productivity by 30 percent. Fpweb.net also deployed Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 with which IT staff can provision virtual servers 60 percent faster. Today, Fpweb.net stays competitive by delivering better customer service at less cost.

Calçados Marte is a leading manufacturer of women’s footwear, with 2009 revenues expected to reach U.S.$165 million. The Brazilian company relies on technology to share data among its internal users and widely dispersed resellers. With just four people on its IT staff responsible for managing its IT infrastructure, Calçados Marte sought to create a more flexible, streamlined environment that could handle the company’s growth, raise the availability of its servers, and improve performance for all of its users. Using the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise operating system with Hyper-V™ technology, and several Microsoft® System Center products, Calçados Marte expects to consolidate servers by nearly 40 percent, cut software update time by half and server provisioning time by two-thirds, and lower overall IT management needs by 30 percent—all while improving service levels and reducing costs.

Founded in 1975, Universidade Vila Velha (UVV) has grown into the largest private university in Espirito Santo, Brazil. Its IT staff of 15 professionals is responsible for managing the entire UVV infrastructure, which is accessed by 1,500 faculty members and 18,000 students. UVV needed to replace its aging servers with a more efficient, flexible, high-performance, and cost-effective environment that would be easy to manage. Using the Windows Server® 2008 Enterprise operating system with Hyper-V™ technology and Microsoft® System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, UVV cut server provisioning from four weeks to several hours, reduced data center energy consumption by 30 percent, streamlined the way it manages the environment, and is improving availability of its IT infrastructure.

Until recently, the server environment at Grad Osijek City Council made it time-consuming and expensive to deploy software. Each application required its own physical server, which had to be acquired through a long procurement process. In April 2009, the council’s IT team worked with Integra Group to virtualise its infrastructure using Windows Server® 2008 and Hyper-V™. The team can now deploy servers and applications in minutes rather than hours.