FPWEB.net Case Study

I’m back with another great case study.  This time, it’s Fpweb.net, a Sharepoint hosting provider.  Fpweb.net switched from VMware ESX to Microsoft Virtualization, resulting in so many benefits by using Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager that I can’t list them all.

But I do want to highlight some of the cost savings and competitive advantages Fpweb.net has gained:

- Saved $100,800 in licensing costs over the VMware solution

- By virtualizing 115 servers, it avoided an increase in data center rental costs of $180,000 a year

- FPweb.net provisions virtual machines 60% faster—which is key to getting new customers up and running quickly

Without a doubt, it’s probably best to hear it directly from the customer:

“There’s no question that consolidating servers and making more efficient use of resources is a win-win situation. Hyper-V gets us there more cost effectively than any other virtualization technology.”

“Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter is primed for large-scale data centers like ours. The Datacenter license includes unlimited virtualization rights. Compared to VMware, which requires a license for each virtualized operating system, we are able to scale our virtualization solution at no extra cost.”

“In hosting, the biggest obstacle to customer service is time: customers want us to stand up their solutions and perform migrations, upgrades, and other services right away. Using Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to automate server management, we gain time in the data center to hit the ground running and wow customers from the outset.”

Like I’ve written before, we have a great repository of case studies covering all the different Microsoft Virtualization technologies, not just Hyper-V.  If you are interested in Virtualization, I strongly suggest you take a look.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I would like to comment on the following statement: “Windows Server 2008 R2 Datacenter is primed for large-scale data centers like ours. The Datacenter license includes unlimited virtualization rights. Compared to VMware, which requires a license for each virtualized operating system, we are able to scale our virtualization solution at no extra cost.” In point of fact, VMware doesn't require the license, Microsoft does. This customer could have just as easily purchased Win2K8 R2 Datacenter for each ESX host and had the same unlimited virtualization rights per host. Forklifting a datacenter solution is not always the best option especially when the Microsoft solutions tout interoperability (especially SCCM) with competitors also keeping in mind that a large scale datacenter would have likely purchased the full suite of VMware management tools. The Sales Engineer could have easily sold this client on SCCM and Win2K8 R2 Datacenter on its own merits and rolled it out with a future lifecycle plan to retire the VMware solution. The ESX licenses and software were a sunk cost. The only true licensing savings was on Microsoft products and future VMware support.