Based on previous experience, Steve Baxter, director of regional IT for Americas for CooperVision, knew that elements of virtualization within choose development and production environments could be the reply to address the rapid growth of the company. “Our growth, externally as well as internally, was massive,” he says. “That included the sheer number of servers brought into the environments, including six major enterprise-level applications brought online in just the past two years alone. The key challenge remained finding the best way to reconcile our business growth within the physical limits presented by our current infrastructure.”

CooperVision, a unit of The Cooper Companies, is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of soft contact lenses. To meet the growth challenge, Baxter decided to use services from VIRTERA to assess the company’s infrastructure, and recommend and install virtualization solutions.

“We arranged with VIRTERA to perform, in cooperation with VMware, a 30-day assessment of our server farm and supply a report that showed the utilization of our servers and the cost benefits accrued from virtualizing,” says Baxter. Leveraging VIRTERA’s vendor-agnostic Virtual Operations Framework (VOF), the assessment showed that many of the company’s systems had a 7 percent utilization rate across all servers and were candidates for consolidation.

“The report grouped likely servers that could benefit from being virtualized, at a ratio of approximately 14:1,” explains Baxter. “While that was impressive, the larger justification was the ability to translate, using that formula, how much we could save by a three-year period in maintenance and total cost of ownership.”

According to Baxter, the benefits of moving from a largely physical environment to a hybrid, physical-virtual one include: increased operational efficiency; reduced hardware, potential and real estate;reduced downtime, both planned and unplanned; accelerated software examining and development; and support for growth of remote offices.

“With VIRTERA’s support, we selected a group of…

[Source] dhiram