Case Studies

In today's difficult economic environment, all companies seek ways to cut business costs. One of the possibilities for serious economizing in the field of information technologies can be reduction of costs on infrastructure, that is, on management of desktop computers and servers. This goal can be attained through employment of virtualization technologies, which enable to ensure the dynamic redistribution of computation load and to increase the consolidation of resources. That is precisely what Gazprom Neft Company did by implementing the Microsoft Hyper-V technology. Owing to that solution, not only did it succeed to increase reliability, flexibility and scalability of its IT infrastructure, but also to significantly reduce expenditures, while substantially increasing work efficiency. At the moment, 15% of all operating corporate applications have been transferred to virtual machines hosted on Hewlett-Packard BL 680 servers.

Global training and consulting firm, FranklinCovey Co., and global retailer, FranklinCovey Products, took advantage of a Microsoft® Enterprise Agreement and Hyper-V™ virtualization software to reduce software licensing costs while expanding capabilities. They upgraded to the Enterprise CAL Suite and used Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter with Hyper-V to create separate virtual environments for each company’s operations. Each used Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services to host remote connectivity applications without a virtual private network. As a result, FranklinCovey Co. saved more than U.S.$500,000 in hardware, licensing, and energy costs. FranklinCovey Products saved $150,000 on call center setup and more than $90,000 on hardware and licensing for its internal domain. Both reduced software testing time by 70 percent and expedited deployment and training with Software Assurance benefits.

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.

Continental Airlines needed to consolidate its server hardware, lower its costs, and achieve a highly available server solution. It also wanted to better serve its remote workers. When the company learned about the virtualization capabilities of Windows Server® 2008 R2 Datacenter, it decided to deploy a beta version of the software. Features such as Remote Desktop Services, Hyper-V™ technology, and Cluster Shared Volumes have streamlined the deployment and management of virtual servers and desktops. Remote users now have a desktop experience nearly identical to in-office workers, helping them to be more productive. Continental has already consolidated more than 125 servers and deployed more than 320 virtual machines. Based on its beta experience, it expects to save U.S.$1.5 million a year in hardware, software, labor, deployment, and related operational costs.