The ability to centralize server management was a key factor in The SCOOTER Store’s quest to find the right virtualization solution. The New Braunfels, Texas-based company is a leading provider of power mobility devices such as power chairs to help people with mobility challenges lead full, self-sufficient lives.

To manage the recent rapid growth and stay in compliance with ever-changing government mandates for documentation, reporting, consumer safety and patient privacy, the company must maintain agile and flexible IT systems.

To that end, The SCOOTER Store is virtualizing its server environment and centralizing server management using Virtual Server 2005 R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2007. As part of its overall virtualization strategy, the company is evaluating Hyper-V to increase the performance of its existing environment.

“Hyper-V is very exciting for us because it is integrated and designed into the operating system,” said Barrett Blake, The SCOOTER Store’s infrastructure architect. “I expect Hyper-V to be even easier to use, faster, and more efficient.”

By year’s end, the IT organization expects to increase the number of applications by 50 percent compared with its previous infrastructure, while reducing the number of physical servers required to host those applications by about 60 percent.

“We had a vision of a dynamic datacenter, and Microsoft technologies gave us a holistic approach to achieve it,” said Jay Greene, The SCOOTER Store’s senior vice president of IT and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) security officer. “By optimizing our environment with virtualization and centralized management, we deliver more functionality at lower cost, and we make IT a strategic contributor to the growth of the company.”

Scalability, Cost and Performance Benefits
Scalability and cost were prime considerations for Ray Pawlikowski as he sought a virtualization solution for his rapidly growing company, HotSchedules. The Austin, Texas-based company specializes in online labor scheduling, offering employees of clients such as The Cheesecake Factory, Outback Steakhouse and P.F. Chang’s access to their work schedules on the Web, text messaging, e-mail and the ability to pick up and release shifts, among other benefits.

With nearly a quarter-million users and 4 million logins per month, the 10-year-old business has doubled in size each year for the past couple years and shows no sign of slowing down. Like Land O’Lakes’ IT team, Pawlikowski signed up for the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) to test Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and is glad he did. “By virtualizing everything, we have been able to increase our server utilization by a factor of 10, providing dramatic opportunities in consolidation and power savings,” he said.

Hyper-V’s scalability derives from its support for multiple processors and cores at the host level and improved memory limits at the host and guest level within virtual machines. This enables customers to scale their virtualization environment to support a large number of virtual machines within a given host and to take advantage of quick migration for high availability across multiple hosts.