Pegasus Technology Pty. Ltd.

A major IT services company in Europe wanted to consolidate and virtualize its servers. The company’s overall goal was to improve productivity by standardizing communication tools across the group, to strengthen security and to promote better IT control and cost-efficiency. The company began looking at ways to consolidate its numerous branch systems into a smaller number of physical servers in a central location. It initially selected virtualization software from a major vendor, but the cost of the approach was threatening to outweigh the potential benefits, so the company decided to use an alternative virtualization software.

Customer Situation A major IT services company in Europe wanted to consolidate and virtualize its servers. The company’s overall goal was to improve productivity by standardizing communication tools across the group, to strengthen security and to promote better IT control and cost-efficiency. The company began looking at ways to consolidate its numerous branch systems into a smaller number of physical servers in a central location. It initially selected virtualization software from a major vendor, but the cost of the approach was threatening to outweigh the potential benefits, so the company decided to use an alternative virtualization software. Making IT Work As One

The Solution To resolve its physical server challenge, the company chose to consolidate using Virtualization and Consolidation from Novell and replaced its existing Windows servers with Linux servers. These new physical servers can now run as many Linux virtual machines as required, which means the company uses much more of its available computing power, even as it cuts cooling and power costs. The company can now create preconfigured virtual machines and bring them into service on existing hardware automatically, whenever the workload demands them. We also made it easy for the company to create virtual environments quickly and easily. IT administrators can build testing and development environments in minutes, rather than hours or days, without affecting the production environment. These abilities were essential since one of the company’s customers had a time-sensitive requirement for a Linux development environment. These virtualization and consolidation capabilities even benefit our customer’s customer, who was able to build a virtual testing environment on the company’s servers, completely circumventing the complex process of procurement and purchasing. This means the company spent its resources developing its offerings rather than chasing vendors. Finding training on the Novell solution was easy. Company engineers attended Advanced Technical Training (ATT) classes on virtualization. Delivered at an engineer-to-engineer level, the company was able to ask about specific situations it had encountered in its environment and get specific answers it could put to immediate use. Using our products, the company has cut its virtualization overhead from 40 percent to as low as five percent. Lower overhead keeps the company agile and gives it a distinct edge by allowing it to respond to its customers’ requests and to business realities much faster than its competitors can. Virtualization allows the company to clone, migrate and restart environments quickly if the system crashes. The company has also reduced its power consumption, space requirements and cooling needs while using up to 95 percent of its available computing power, rather than the 60 percent it had been realizing with its previous virtualization solution. Only Novell offers operating system-based virtualization with cross-platform systems management. It is the most robust and best-supported open source virtualization solution for Windows server consolidation, and it integrates seamlessly with your existing infrastructure. With our enterprise-grade open source solution, based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, the company was able to replace its existing server system, lower costs and increase performance throughout the enterprise.