Slideshow: 5 Tools to Prevent Energy Waste in the Data Center

"What made Liquid stand out was they had a background in the telecom industry and knew about [network] reliability," said Joel Chaplin, CIO for Virtuoso, in an interview. The company is based in Fort Worth, Texas, and has a data center in Seattle.

Virtuoso last year was researching ways to virtualize its data center, partly to prepare to increase its number of member users by 10 times in the next few years. Today, about 300 travel agencies with 6,000 travel specialists pay a membership fee to Virtuoso to use its network to match travel customers with a variety of tour suppliers for a range of exotic and luxury vacations.

"We needed a platform that would scale with the company as it grew, yet be more efficient and lower operating costs," Chaplin said. "We're a lean company with technology and don't have a lot of administrators, so it also had to be something easy to administer and deploy."

When the upgrade was first considered last year, Virtuoso had a "mish-mash of servers, including dozens of HP servers" and considered using HP for unified computing. Instead, it discovered Liquid, Chaplin said. "We knew the price point of Liquid would be lower than HP," he said. Cisco was expected to have a unified computing platform, but hadn't developed anything concrete, he added. Cisco's approach is only now rolling out to customers.

As it was, Virtuoso's investment with Liquid, based in Stamford, Conn., was less than $1 million, "still a big investment for us," Chaplin said. The company installed a LiquidIQ unified computing system for hosting its Web-based services for its travel network. Liquid calls LiquidIQ a "data center in a chassis" because it can integrate with NetApp Inc. to replace an assortment of server, network, storage and virtualization technologies. Virtuoso installed the first chassis in February, which went live in April, and expects to install a second chassis in the fall.

The changeover means that Virtuoso is on target to reduce its data center costs by 80%, with a smaller physical space, less power consumption and reduced administrative overhead. Already, a staff of five administrators has been reduced to two, he said.

The data center supports a sophisticated search engine that gives travel agents the ability to find suppliers for customized luxury vacations.