By reducing data center space, Schwan's IT team has been able to raise their air conditioning setpoint by one degree and reap the savings.

"Since we are in the middle of summer, we anticipate that in a month we'll be able to raise it another degree," says Mount. "This will save a lot in energy and extend the life of air-conditioning units themselves."

Schwans has also been able, through virtualization, to reduce the amount of rack space consumed by network gear. And, the company, through attrition has been able to reduce staffing as well—"We'll see an annual savings of $350,000 over the next two years," says Mount.

What else is innovative about Schwan's virtualization project? Virtualization has transformed the company's disaster recovery plan, Mount says.

"By using virtual desktops we can virtualize a lot of their environments and transfer them or copy them to the DR site, so when our infrastructure is up, many of the key individuals can be up and running and able to meet our recovery time objective much quicker," says Mount.

"The last time we tested our disaster recovery plan, we brought up 150 servers in 3 to 4 hours," Mount says.

By virtualizing the servers, Mount is able to replicate them to the disaster recovery site located 600 miles away in Chicago.

"With virtualization, we are able to buy less physical hardware at our disaster recovery site and are able to bring up more systems on the same amount of physical hardware," Mount says.

Mount and Miller have seen the benefits of consolidation in other parts of their data center, as well.

"We've reduced the number of servers in our environment by 33 percent," says Mount. "Just two months ago, we removed 54 physical servers." The company has virtualized 460 physical servers.

For all these reasons, Schwan's virtualization project has been a success on levels that go beyond saving space.

"We've been able to reduce space in the data center and make management easier, as well as create a disaster recovery site that provides a cleaner, simpler and more effective solution," Mount says.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW in Austin, Texas. You can reach her at dconnor@ssg-now.com.

© 2009 CXO Media Inc.