VMware Gives Affordable DR

VMware, Inc. announced that its efforts to deliver increased value to small and medium businesses (SMB) have resulted in thousands of customers worldwide using VMware vSphere solutions, including significant deployments in key SMB markets, such as education, financial services, healthcare, IT consulting and manufacturing.

"We’re running numerous mission-critical applications on VMware vSphere and we expect to save between $2 million and $3 million over three years," said Tom Hines, chief information officer at Trilliant, an SMB that provides intelligent network solutions for smart utility grids. "That’s a 2000-percent ROI on our VMware investment. And the benefits extend well beyond cost savings. We’re also much more agile. For example, setting up our hosted solution for a new customer takes about 40 minutes on VMware vSphere. It required nearly an entire day of valuable staff time previously. And now we’re adding to our VMware vSphere environment with functionality like disaster recovery and IT charge backs. VMware vSphere has been a big win for our business from both a financial and strategic perspective."

VMware solutions enable SMBs to save valuable time among their over-burdened IT staff by automating routine tasks, boosting productivity and responding faster to changes in real-world business conditions.

VMware’s cost-effective and easy to deploy solutions also offer SMBs built-in security and data protection to help ensure ‘Always On’ IT and continuous uptime for their applications. Specific features in the VMware vSphere platform, such as VMware Fault Tolerance, VMware Data Recovery, VMotion and VMware vShield Zones, offer SMBs a level of resiliency for their businesses that had been reserved for only the largest enterprises in the past. VMware has also lowered the bar for SMBs to buy and use these capabilities with specific packages targeting this market segment and the lowest cost per application, the true way to measure cost for virtualization solutions.

"VMware vSphere allows small and medium businesses like us to do more with the limited resources available. Our datacenter is over 80 percent virtualized, including mission-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Electronic Medical Records and Digital X-Ray and MRI. And thanks to new features like Fault Tolerance and Data Recovery, we can easily ensure that they are protected and 100 percent available. There’s no question that my team is more agile when bringing up new systems. With VMware vSphere, we’ve drastically reduced the time to provision a new server because we don’t have to go out and buy a machine – we just spin up a new virtual machine in a matter of minutes," said Justin Lauer, IT manager at Campbell Clinic. "We’ve also saved over $100,000 in hardware, maintenance, power and cooling so far, and expect that number to keep increasing over the next few years. VMware vSphere has really transformed our business – we have an enterprise class IT infrastructure and achieving this was so easy with VMware."

"VMware has enabled us to deliver great performance and services to both internal and external customers, all while reducing cost by 80%. We can now maximize our computing resources by consolidating our infrastructure and allowing computing power to go where it’s needed most – customer service and development by day, production by night. In addition, VMware High Availability provides an easy and cost effective way to help ensure our systems are up and running 24/7," said Chad Burney, infrastructure manager at COCC. "We look forward to using VMware vSphere features such as Fault Tolerance and Thin Provisioning to further leverage existing resources and support our record growth."

The VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Edition is ideal for businesses starting with 20 physical servers or less and offers a complete integrated package that includes High Availability, Data Recovery and central management. VMware vSphere Advanced Edition offers a robust business continuity solution ideal for companies with between 20 and 50 servers, and includes Fault Tolerance, VMware vShield Zones, VMware VMotion in addition to High Availability and Data Recovery.

Brand preference for VMware among SMB customers has grown significantly over the past year as more companies come to understand the unique value of the VMware platform. VMware is the proven virtualization leader for the SMB market with its 4th generation product. The scalability and efficiency of VMware’s virtualization architecture set it apart from competitors and allow customers to do more while spending up to 50 percent less on computing hardware. Customers also realize dramatic savings in power consumption, network cabling, datacenter space, cooling requirements, and storage systems. And VMware’s management and automation tools lead the industry, helping SMBs leverage the IT resources they already have in place for maximum strategic advantage.

"We’re such a small shop. There are only two of us on the IT team and we used to spend hours in our server room rebuilding, removing or moving servers around. Now with VMware, we rarely have to go into the server room. We just don’t need to. Instead we can spend our time focusing on what’s important – our users," explained Robert Cooley, operations specialist at Gradient Analytics. "We evaluated other virtualization products including Microsoft Hyper-V and they just didn’t compare. In addition to all of the great features VMware offers, we can achieve a much higher VM density with VMware – close to 20 virtual machines running on one physical host – which translates to lower overall costs to run our applications."

"There’s never been a better time for small and medium businesses to energize their organizations with virtualization," said Joe Andrews, group manager, SMB product marketing at VMware. "In the past, SMBs have been forced to spend up to 70 percent of IT time and resources on mundane tasks just to maintain the status quo. Only 30 percent of the IT work was focused on delivering new capabilities to enable business growth. We’ve increased SMB adoption of virtualization by turning that 70/30 ratio on its head. We automated and simplified infrastructure management to help SMBs get ahead rather than tread water. SMBs now have enterprise-class disaster recovery, superior performance and scalability at a very affordable entry price. VMware gives SMBs the power of agility and the power to transform the way they operate."

"Having an enterprise-class disaster recovery solution seemed out of reach for us because we thought solutions on the market were too expensive and too complex to implement," said Nate Stuyvesant, chief technology officer of Genilogix. "Like many companies our size, protecting our data and ensuring that our applications are critical to our business and the SLAs that we have to our customers. VMware vSphere gives us the robust capabilities of VMware HA and Data Recovery that ensure that we have the data protection we need to protect our business. We looked at other virtualization technology such as XenServer and Hyper-V but we found those products to lack the features that we really consider essential for virtualization. No other solution on the market gives us this kind of peace of mind at a price that we can afford."