25,000 seat Fortune 500 company switches from VMware, saves $3.2m!
Engineering firm CH2M HILL was an early user of virtualization software to lower server costs. However, when the global economy began to slump in 2007, the company sought a more cost-effective virtualization solution than VMware. It switched to the Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter operating system with Hyper-V virtualization technology, and also deployed Microsoft System Center data center solutions to simplify server management.
This is a great reference point and highlights that virtualization is more about the surrounding management of the environment rather than the just the hypervisor.
https://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2010/aug10/08-25CH2MHillPR.mspx
A few choice parts of the article:
“By switching to Microsoft from VMware, we will save $280,000 in software fees. Plus, we can now afford to tackle our 600 field servers and are aiming to virtualize 20 percent of these computers each year. At $5,000 a server, that’s a savings of $3 million over the next three to five years.”
“The company also expects to reduce server administration work by 30 percent so it can focus on more strategic work like branch office virtualizing, infrastructure upgrading and architecture planning.”
"These customers use Microsoft System Center to manage virtualized and nonvirtualized servers, desktops and applications, and Microsoft Hyper-V Server and VMware ESX. The broad use of virtualization technology provides customers with increased flexibility to scale their applications, which can be more easily adapted to meet changing business needs and take advantage of the transition to cloud computing.”
And my personal favorite:
“Microsoft and its ecosystem of hardware and software partners offer all the capabilities customers need to ensure a path to private and public cloud computing capabilities.”
Those wanting to speak with Microsoft representatives about their datacenter and desktop virtualization plans should visit Microsoft’s booth 1431 at VMworld 2010 conference, Aug. 30–Sept. 2 in San Francisco.
You can read the full CH2M Hill case study here.