Success Stories

Bruce & Merrilees

Bruce & Merrilees offers its clients electrical-project solutions that include industrial and commercial electrical services, high-voltage construction, transportation electrical systems, and ongoing maintenance and service projects. The New Castle, PA, company has been around for more than 60 years—in part because it knows how to blend oldfashioned business sense with state-of-the-art technology. That knack extends to its datacenter, where application performance and availability are enhanced with VMware vSphere Essentials Plus.

“A few of our servers were getting old, and for what it would have cost us to replace them, we were able to put in a vSphere-based virtual system,” explains Manager of Information Systems Stephen Miller. “Now we don’t have to worry about capacity or even think about replacing our equipment for several years.”

Bruce & Merrilees began virtualizing with vSphere in August 2009. “It was easy, extremely easy,” Miller reports.“It took us about a month to convert themajority of our existing servers.” And now that he’s been working with vSphere for a few months, hehas come to appreciateits management tools and features. “Since our migration to vSphere, it’s much easier to see what’s going on with all our servers and applications—all at once and from a single console,” he says.

“Even better, our applications perform better when they’re running on vSphere,” Miller adds. He notices the improvement most in the company’s key business-critical application, an accounting program from Sage Software called Timberline Office.“It’s very data-intensive, but now that were running it on vSphere, we’re receiving fewer reports of slowdowns and problems with network connectivity. So the rest of the company is happier—which makes the people in our IT shop happier, too.”

Challenge

Increase the efficiency of the hardware— and the IT professionals—in a small but busy datacenter.

Solution

An easy-to-manage virtual infrastructure based on VMware vSphere Essentials Plus that reduces costs, streamlines administration, and improves application availability.

Results

• Significant hardware savings. “We started with 12 servers, many of them older ones that needed refreshing, and we were able to eliminate eight of them by migrating to vSphere,” Miller says.
• 7:1 consolidation ratio with plenty of capacity for future growth. “We have fourteen virtual machines running on two ESX hosts,” Miller explains. “And as our business grows, the extra capacity is there for our IT infrastructure to grow—without buying any new hardware or even upgrading our existing servers.”
• Faster server provisioning to respond to changing business needs. “Before we virtualized with vSphere, we wanted to add a document-management system, but hold-ups with the vendor meant it took about a month before we got the hardware we needed,” Miller recalls. “And because other projects got in the queue while we waited, that one-month delay actually pushed the project back six months. But with vSphere, when our business requirements change, we can tackle big projects quickly. For instance, last month we began development of a portal for our company, and we were up and running with the software installed on a new virtual serverwithin a day.”
• Better business continuity. “With vSphere, I can create a new server and purpose it for one application,” Miller says. “Since all our applications are running on separate virtual servers, we can reboot them or do maintenance without affecting other servers—or the entire company.
• Ability to set up a test environment for troubleshooting.“Being a small environment, we didn’t really have any ability to test applications and upgrades before vSphere,” Miller explains. “Now if we’re upgrading an application, vSphere lets us make a clone and run some tests so we know what to expect when we do it in our production environment.”