Virtual Servers Cut Costs and Increase Continuity

A small industry association in Washington DC recently migrated its accounting functions to a new platform, but due to platform differences, were unable to migrate the pre-existing data to the new system. This meant that the old platform server has to be maintained for auditing purposes. The problem is that the old server was a very low-end six year old server that did not have a long-term future. Additionally, the organization had several other low-end servers of the same age that needed upgrades as well.

CNS investigated the options - install four new servers and manually migrate the applications to each new server (which would have cost approximately $25,000) or implement a single new server and use virtual server technology to migrate the existing servers from the aging hardware to a more portable and stable platform (at a cost of about $10,000). Based on cost alone, the customers choice was made for them before they even understood what virtual technology was!

Using a high powered and reliable HP ProLiant server as the host machine, CNS successfully migrated the existing low-end servers into virtual servers. Additionally, we created a new virtual server to house a new database application, that was also developed by CNS. Using this method, CNS was able to complete the migration with zero downtime and actually increased the performance of all servers across the board. Additionally, these virtual servers are now highly portable. If anything happens to the single host computer, we simply move the virtual server to a different host, wihout interruption to business operation.

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