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.

T2 Systems offers a unified, hosted solution for parking management—a unique offering for the industry. As demand for its solution grew, the company had to add physical servers to its environment—a costly, time-consuming process. T2 implemented Windows Server® 2008 Hyper-V™ virtualization technology and virtual servers, eliminating 32 physical servers. As a result, it reduced server and licensing costs, improved scalability, and enhanced customer service.

Based in Brick, New Jersey, the Brick Township Board of Education administers a school district for students from kindergarten through grade 12. To maximize computing services for 2,000 employees while minimizing costs, the IT department turned to server virtualization, but its VMware solution couldn’t virtualize the district’s many transactional systems that use Microsoft® SQL Server®. Instead of upgrading its VMware solution, the board saved approximately U.S.$25,000 by migrating to Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™ technology. Now it can virtualize its transactional systems and eliminate more than 90 percent of its physical servers. The IT staff also deployed Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to optimize the performance of both physical and virtual servers, boosting IT staff productivity and saving days on server provisioning and routine administrative tasks.

The University of Miami (UM) is one of the leading research universities in the United States. With a server infrastructure that exceeded its facility’s capacity and required the use of valuable resources to administer, the 10 IT staff in UM’s enterprise Windows server group needed to consolidate servers and streamline management. Now it is running Windows Server® 2008 with Hyper-V™, migrating VMware Server and Microsoft® Virtual Server 2005 to the Hyper-V technology, and using Microsoft System Center products to manage, monitor, and back up its environment. As a result, UM cut data center space and power requirements, realized 80 percent savings in energy costs compared to its previous nonvirtualized environment, enhanced utilization of physical servers, slashed virtual server deployment time from hours to minutes, and enabled a more robust disaster recovery plan.