Furniture seller Slumberland has just two system administrators to operate its network, and its CIO keeps a close eye on IT performance using several metrics, including system availability, service level agreements and total cost of ownership per users, reports Sean Michael Kerner at CIOUpdate. When the company decided to begin implementing server virtualization as part of a network overhaul, it needed a technology that was not going to be too complicated or time-consuming to deploy and learn.  

Slumberland chose to deploy Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Hyper-V virtualization offering on Cisco's (NASDAQ: CSCO) Unified Computing System platform, and the company has saved about $368,000 in capital costs, Kerner reports. Previously there were 95 servers, and now there are basically four, which not only take up less space but also make management easier.

"It's really simple and it's a good way of abstracting servers," said Slumberland CIO Jamie Page. "We do this kind of thing in IT every day with DNS, storage and other things and it works great. Why someone didn't do it with servers before--I don't know."

For more:
- see Sean Michael Kerner's article at CIOUpdate

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