The client:
The company has an international portfolio of snowboard, snowshoe, bike, in-line skate, alpine, telemark / Nordic ski equipment, apparel and accessories. Their brands and businesses are world renowned as leaders in design, production, and sales and marketing.

In order to support the ongoing needs of the business, the technical services team was struggling with the exponential growth of x86 servers in the datacenter. The increasing need for new space, power, cooling and server management was quickly becoming unmanageable.

The solution:
LG Consulting applied our proven methodology to help facilitate containment of their growth of physical servers. The technical services project manager engaged our organization in a containment study that resulted in developing a plan which reduced server growth from a projected 250 servers to 11 physical servers. This resulted in lower power and cooling costs and significantly less server management effort. It also resulted in not purchasing over 200 new servers which significantly increased their available budget. More importantly, it also postponed the need for a new data center.

The second phase was to evaluate their current infrastructure for simple servers to consolidate and our teams were able to develop a plan to remove another 100 servers, which has resulted in lower management costs of over 20%.

Technologies:
After analyzing the client's current environment and capturing their vision, goals and requirements, LG Consulting recommended a Microsoft Hyper V infrastructure solution. With confidence, LG Consulting built the customer an enterprise-class virtualization solution, bringing industry-leading management into their x86 virtual server environments for production workloads. The client was able to repurpose their existing infrastructure without any additional purchases.

Windows Server Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allowed our client to make the best use of their server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines running on a single physical machine. They were able to efficiently run multiple operating systems - Windows, Linux, and others - in parallel on a single server. With Hyper-V and simple licensing policies, it's easier than ever to take advantage of the cost savings of virtualization.

Microsoft Hyper-V Server provided a simplified, reliable, and optimized virtualization solution, enabling improved server utilization and reduced costs. After implementation our client was easily able to leverage existing knowledge and skills, which resulted in minimizing any support learning curve.