Dell Case Study Sample

However, many of the company’s 30 or so servers were not being used at full potential, including the server that hosted the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 e-mail messaging and collaboration software. “Our most-taxed server hosted Exchange Server 2003 and ran at about 30 percent utilization,” says Nicholas Merton, IT Support at the Maxol. “Our other servers ran at 10 percent utilization or less. Most of our computing horsepower sat idle, yet we had to keep adding servers and were in danger of maxing out our data center facility.”

Because it does not recover or refine oil, Maxol’s business model and profits are based on distribution efficiencies and cost control. “We’re always looking for efficiencies to cut costs and reduce our operational overhead while providing excellent IT services,” McCormack says.

Solution
Maxol realized that it needed to halt server proliferation and improve server utilization by embracing virtualization. Maxol first experimented with virtualization in 2007 by implementing Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 Service Pack 1 in a cluster configuration. On this three-node cluster, the IT staff created 12 virtual machines that ran several infrastructure applications, such as domain controllers, file and print servers, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 data management software, and administrative functions. However, there were limits to this virtualization solution: it could not support multicore processors, threaded applications, or Exchange Server 2007. “We wanted to migrate our entire server estate to a virtual environment and needed a virtualization solution that would take us there,” Merton says.