Evolving Solutions has been named winner of the award for "Outstanding Virtualization System Solution" in the annual IBM Beacon Awards competition, honoring IBM Business Partners worldwide for their ingenuity, innovation, customer satisfaction and achievements in providing business solutions.

This year's award was won on the strength of an x86 Virtualization Solution designed for a major sugar marketing cooperative. Originally running 20 applications on 30 HP servers, the customer's storage was close to capacity and its datacenter had become hard to manage.

Evolving Solutions assessed its server environment and implemented two four-way IBM System x servers, a SAN solution based on the DS4700, and IBM Director Management Software. Ultimately, this solution consolidated thirty total servers to two.

This year's judges commented that, "Evolving Solutions demonstrated strong client value using a solution-focused approach incorporating IBM System x, an IBM SAN solution, IBM software and third-party products. This was an excellent example of how to take a customer with an aging infrastructure and leapfrog a few generations of technology to arrive at an up-to-date, virtualized environment."

As a result of this Beacon Award winning solution, the customer can now add capacity as their needs grow, improve the manageability of data with centralized storage and provide information to their customers more rapidly thanks to faster access times.

Further, backup times have been cut in half and data center operating costs have dropped sharply thanks to the implementation of energy-efficient x3950 servers that reduce the overall energy requirements for heating and cooling the datacenter.

"As an IBM Beacon Award winner, Evolving Solutions is being recognized as a leader in positioning new technologies and helping clients adopt virtualization as a new standard in their data center," said Ravi Marwaha, general manager, IBM Global Business Partners. "By helping organizations implement a virtualized platform environment, Evolving Solutions is increasing business value for customers through reduced operating costs and better management of assets."

"The successful design and implementation of this virtualization solution has provided a key client the capability to more effectively manage their server environments and improve overall data center efficiency," states Jaime Gmach, Evolving Solutions President & CEO. "We are honored to win the Beacon Award for our Virtualization System Solution while also providing measurable value to our client."