IT Firm Virtualizes Databases: Trims Servers 85 Percent, Ups Performance 50 Percent

As its business grew rapidly, IT consultancy Avanade watched its data centers fill up with servers, which caused hardware, energy, and management costs to soar. To put a halt to runaway server growth and rising data center costs, Avanade deployed the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system with the Hyper-V virtualization technology. It is virtualizing even its most demanding workloads, including databases running the Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software. As a result, Avanade will cut servers by 85 percent, reduce data center costs by 40 percent using Microsoft System Center, and improve database performance by 50 percent. Avanade is also a more agile organization now, with the ability to create virtual machines on demand to serve dynamic business needs.