Service Provider Uses Virtualization to Boost DR

Posted by George Hulme on December 12, 2008

Tags: Backup & Recovery,  Infrastructure,  Other

Channel: Backup & Recovery, Data Center, Other

While most companies have dabbled in virtualizing their physical servers, third-party logistics software and services provider Transplace went the distance by virtualizing 95 percent of the companys servers, storage, and disaster-recovery systems.

You hear it all the time: Virtualization is great for cost savings among non business-critical systems, but it's just not ready to run applications in production.

Whoever still holds those beliefs hasn't had a conversation with Vincent Biddlecombe, CTO at Transplace, which delivers its logistics software to its customers via software-as-a-service, has 500 employees, and about $2.5 billion in annual sales.

A little more than a year ago, Transplace decided that the time had come to move its data center, which then resided on the tenth floor of its corporate office building in Plano, Texas, to a more secure location. During its examination of data center options, the company considered many possibilities, from outsourcing all of its application hosting, to a complete in-house infrastructure refresh. "It became clear to us that we could continue hosting our own applications more cost effectively than outsourcing," says Biddlecombe.