2009 Innovation Insight Awards: Here’s to virtualization

MOST INNOVATIVE PROCESS ¦ SECOND PLACE SABMiller RUS discovered the business value of virtualization technology—and as a result, earned second place for the Most Innovative Process in MBT's 2009 Innovation Insight Awards competition. SABMiller RUS, a subsidiary of SABMiller, Plc, distributes well known brands of beer—including Miller and Coors—in the Russian market.

By Malcolm Wheatley, Senior Contributing Editor July 1, 2009

MOST INNOVATIVE PROCESS

SABMiller RUS discovered the business value of virtualization technology—and as a result, earned second place for the Most Innovative Process in MBT’s 2009 Innovation Insight Awards competition. SABMiller RUS, a subsidiary of SABMiller, Plc, distributes well known brands of beer—including Miller and Coors—in the Russian market.

To support the business, the SABMiller RUS IT department had long adhered to a policy of dedicating individual servers for each business application. As the business grew, however, this policy led to inefficiencies that no business executive could tolerate.

There were 48 servers in the company’s Moscow data center, none of which were using more than 3 percent of their total computing capacity.

With the help of Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Energy Consulting, SABMiller specialists virtualized the server environment using Hyper V virtualization technology, a feature of the Windows Server 2008 operating system. The new server environment is now managed using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

This change cut SABMiller’s total IT costs by 48 percent, and savings in individual areas exceeded that amount. The IT department saved 75 percent in provisioning costs due to increased efficiency, and realized a 64 percent savings by avoiding both planned and unplanned down time.

Because the company purchases fewer physical servers for its virtualized environment, SABMiller RUS reduced equipment costs and drove additional savings in energy costs for power and cooling, system software licenses, equipment space, warranty service, maintenance, and support.

And all this happened without causing any disruptions to the company’s primary business of delivering beer.

https://www.sabmiller.com

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