CDW Case Study Sample

Results: Availability, CPU Utilization, Freed Tech Time

Typically, health care organizations want their data center onsite rather than use an outsourced hosted solution. In this situation, servers are deployed at a 1:1 ratio (one server for one business application). While this model can provide a reliable environment, server utilization rates are typically low and valuable floor or rack space is inefficiently used. Using a 1:1 ratio also requires IT staff to spend a large amount of time servicing the environment to maintain reliability. To combat these issues, a growing trend is to implement a virtualization solution.

After understanding what virtualization had to offer, Lakeview Medical Center decided to adopt the industry trend and consolidate servers with a virtualization solution. During the initial roll out, Lakeview Medical Center consolidated two-thirds of its servers to achieve a 4:1 ratio.

“A big advantage that VMware gave us was the ability to go to a 4:1 ratio,” commented Gerrits. “Being able to decommission under-utilized servers helped us save data center space and infrastructure resources, not to mention allowing us to standardize on servers. Our future plans call for up to an 8:1 ratio, and with less servers comes less risk of hardware failure.”