Wed, July 09, 2008 — CIO — John Mount's attitude toward server and desktop virtualization couldn't be more enthusiastic.

"If we can virtualize it, we will," says Mount, senior director of IS infrastructure for Schwan Food, a multibillion-dollar, privately-held frozen foods company with 22,000 employees, headquartered in Marshall, Minn.

Mount and Cory Miller, senior IT operations manager, are responsible for virtualizing more than 50 percent of the company's servers and desktops in the past six years. That's a lot of cost put on ice.

Schwan's virtualization project began in 2002, with the focus on reducing space in the data center and facilitating a disaster recovery plan.

"Both projects started out focusing on two different requirements," says Kathleen McNulty, senior VP of information services and CIO for Schwan's. "As we saw the values virtualization could provide our company, additional benefits were identified at that time, which expanded into our virtualizing many of the desktops in the company."

In 2002, Mount and Miller started by virtualizing 30 to 40 servers using VMware ESX Server.

And so far, Schwan's, having spent about $2.2 million on their virtualization projects, has realized a savings of over $900,000 by eliminating the need to buy 100 additional servers. Because they extended the life of their desktop machines by converting to Wyse thin client Windows appliances, they also saved more than $1.5 million on the purchase of new PCs, according to Schwan's.

"We had a lot of hardware that was due to be replaced," says Miller. "In many cases, without virtualization, we would have to rebuild and reinstall the software and operating system and go through the testing process. Since we were virtualized, we were able to just move the hardware onto the VMware platform and save our operations and development teams a lot of time."

By consolidating servers, the company also reduced its electrical consumption, which resulted in a savings of $10,000 to $12,000 per month.

All these benefits grew out of Schwan's desire to extend the life of its data center and reduce its space requirements.

"Our data center was about 90 percent full at one point, so we saw ourselves growing beyond its capacity if we didn't do something," says Mount. "As we projected out three years and planned where we were going to put the servers and expand and what servers we were going to put in, we realized that we were going to run out of capacity in a very short period of time."