Case Studies

Based in Louisville, Jefferson County Public Schools is the largest school district in the state of Kentucky. Operating in an economic downturn, the district felt pressure to reduce costs without affecting classroom learning. The IT department responded by looking for a solution to contain server sprawl, standardize a disparate server infrastructure across more than 150 schools, and centralize IT management. To achieve these goals, it deployed the Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter operating system and the Hyper-V™ virtualization technology. To date, it has reduced physical servers by 10 percent in remote locations and 30 percent in the data center. The IT staff is using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to administer the district’s centralized IT server infrastructure more efficiently. With the money saved, the district can reallocate funds to more strategic initiatives.

R.L. Polk provides marketing data and services to the auto industry in the form of subscription-based software applications hosted in R.L. Polk data centers. Getting new applications and services to market quickly and serving new customers requires rapid server provisioning. To speed server rollout and reduce burgeoning hardware and management costs, R.L. Polk deployed Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™ technology and Microsoft® System Center data center solutions. The company has reduced server deployment time by 90 percent, which improves business agility and IT staff productivity. By eliminating 80 physical servers, Polk saved U.S.$300,000 in hardware-related costs. Using Microsoft software, Polk has been able to reduce its IT staff while growing data center capacity 30 percent annually, and has also improved server and application availability.

Crutchfield sells consumer electronics through its mail-order catalog and its e-commerce Web site. The IT staff turned to virtualization to cut data center costs, improve IT staff productivity, and promote business agility. However, its VMware solution couldn’t virtualize 64-bit operating systems, limiting server consolidation and the deployment of new software to development staff. Crutchfield opted not to spend approximately U.S.$44,000 to upgrade its VMware solution, instead deploying a cost-effective solution to achieve its goals—the Windows Server® 2008 Datacenter operating system and the Hyper-V™ virtualization technology. Today, IT has cut data center heat output by 50 percent and reduced physical servers by 30 percent. The IT staff also deployed Microsoft® System Center data center solutions to manage physical and virtual servers, boosting IT staff productivity by 40 percent.

Lionbridge Technologies, a localization services provider, needed to centralize its IT infrastructure. The company deployed virtual servers in its corporate data center by using Hyper-V™ in Windows Server® 2008 and then upgrading to Windows Server 2008 R2. As a result, Lionbridge has cut electricity costs by 75 percent in its virtualized environment, decreased hardware expenses, and tripled server infrastructure while using existing floor space.