The use of virtualization technology, particularly for server consolidation, has led to some pretty impressive savings for midmarket companies. With those wins under their belt, CIOs are looking for additional benefits from further tuning their virtual server environments, as well as from storage and desktop virtualization.

 

Extra Space Storage Inc., a self-service storage space provider with 685 facilities and 2,500 employees, exemplifies the benefits of consolidation through server virtualization. The firm saved $100,000 to $150,000 on the cost of a new data center chiller alone by virtualizing 63 servers down to 46.

 

The company is using VMware ESX to reduce that number even further, from 46 to 15 servers in the coming year, as it strives to go green. CIO Bill Hoban said the consolidation helps Salt Lake City-based Extra Space Storage avoid costly UPS system upgrades as well.

 

Extra Space Storage will tackle its EMC storage array next. The company will move all shared files on servers across departments onto the EMC storage array. At the same time it will set a cutoff point for stored customer information at 37 months, instead of keeping information forever, which is its current policy.

 

"So any customer information older than 37 months we plan to take off EMC and put it on someone else's virtualization [infrastructure] or cloud like [Amazon] AWS or Google," Hoban said. "With the storage array, that's a pretty expensive piece of equipment to hold [archived] data, when it could be better utilized for real-time data."

 

Peet's Coffee & Tea Inc., a coffee retailer with 195 locations that also delivers products to 8,200 grocery stores, has spent the past two years consolidating servers with VMware ESX.

 

It did not set out to use ESX as a tool in its ERP implementation, but that's what happened when CIO Tom Cullen started to work with VMware's Stage Manager technology.

 

"We are using Stage Manager to make a virtualized electronic fence around our testing environments for production testing of our ERP system and boundary systems like order management, accounting and inventory management," Cullen said. The company also tests its new integration layer, based on Microsoft BizTalk Server, in the Stage Manager environment.

 

Cullen said building such an environment pushed the boundaries of the product's capabilities. Peet's also had to push Microsoft to support Microsoft Dynamics AX on VMware virtualization technology -- building its own mock test environment would have been too complex an undertaking. (Read more about Peet's ERP implementation in "ERP case study: Implementing ERP to manage growth, fix legacy issues.")