Sweet Success with Virtualization: CiBan Teams with Precision Network Design to Help Astor Chocolate Deploy VMware
CiBan, a technology solution provider, today announced that it teamed with Precision Network Design (PND) to help Astor Chocolate successfully deploy VMware Infrastructure. As a result of the deployment, Astor Chocolate has been able to lower cooling costs, increase manageability, obtain high availability and utilize their server infrastructure more efficiently. Established in 1950, Astor Chocolate is a leading manufacturer of premium chocolate products.
Prior to VMware, Astor Chocolate managed 45-plus servers. These servers supported a broad range of business-critical applications such as Microsoft Exchange, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and SQL databases. CiBan along with Precision Network Design and Astor Chocolate's internal IT group manage the company's data center operations.
Paul Banco, CEO of CiBan, and David Cabassa, CEO of PND needed to deliver a solution that would not only improve ongoing support and maintenance of the data center, but also reduce costs for their client. "Servers today are more powerful than ever, and are highly underutilized," explained Banco. "Take a file server for example. It requires almost no processing power, and yet the investment in this hardware is not fully optimized." Most servers outside of Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL fall under the same umbrella.
Dominik Huzar, the lead engineer for VMware at CiBan added, “The beauty of VMware and virtualization is that it not only allows for high availability, but enables you to allocate resources such as memory and processing power as you see fit. If you have a server with 8 gigs of memory, depending on your environment, you can allocate half of that to Microsoft Exchange, a quarter to the file server and the remainder to the domain controller. Generally most organizations would deploy three separate servers for this, with VMware we were able to consolidate this into one."
Huzar and Cabassa analyzed each server's needs to determine how VMware Infrastructure would be configured, and then developed a business case that include a compelling return on investment (ROI). The team was able to deliver a solution that would take Astor Chocolate's 45-plus servers down to just four dual quad core HP blade servers.
When delivered, Arie Lax, CTO of Astor Chocolate was astonished. CiBan and PND were able to show us how with VMware, we can save $385,000 in equipment over the next three years alone. Not to mention, the new deployment would require less real-estate in the data center, less power, less cooling and most of all, gain high availability and better management of our technology infrastructure." Totaling a 965,000 ROI
Astor Chocolate is an environmentally safe company. They installed their own co-generation plant to produce power in order to cool the three million pounds of chocolate they produce each week.