Operational Efficiency – Strathclyde Fire & Rescue Saves Money and Improves Efficiency with Hyper-V
Strathclyde Fire & Rescue Service is the largest in Scotland, protecting more than half the population. It has nine area headquarters managing a total of 111 community fire stations. The service needed to reduce operating costs and reinforce its green credentials by virtualising servers. Bandwidth limitations at nine remote sites had reduced the potential for centralising support services.
Strathclyde put together a strategy with three principal objectives—to consolidate servers and use virtual machines, reduce operating costs, and improve the carbon footprint of the organisation. Environmental sustainability is a major commitment in the service’s current Integrated Risk Management Plan, which sets out the governing policies of the service.
Strathclyde Fire & Rescue Service was using VMware before, but found the licensing costs prohibitive. After an evaluation, the fire and rescue service chose the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system with Hyper-V technology as the preferred solution.
The virtualisation solution is delivering these benefits in terms of environmental sustainability, operational efficiency, disaster tolerance and saving money to Strathclyde Fire & Rescue:
- Improving resilience at remote locations
- Consolidating physical servers on a 10:1 ratio
- Lowering software licensing costs
- Restoring applications quickly and easily
- Providing a reliable solution for testing software upgrades
- Boosting overall ICT productivity
You can read the full story of Strathclyde Fire & Rescue Service virtualisation with Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 and Hyper-V here.
Posted by Dan