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VMware Powers Big Savings for UniSource Energy
UniSource Deploys Business-Critical Apps From IBM, Microsoft and Oracle on VMware Platform to Reduce Costs, Extend Life of Datacenter and Minimize Environmental Footprint
| Source: VMware, Inc.
PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire - May 19, 2009) - VMware, Inc. (NYSE : VMW ), the global leader
in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today
announced that UniSource Energy Corp. (NYSE : UNS ) has deployed VMware's
industry-leading virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure
3, to help reduce capital and operating expenses, extend the life of a
datacenter that had reached its original capacity, and reduce power
consumption as part of its commitment to responsible environmental
stewardship.
Through its subsidiaries, UniSource provides electricity and natural gas to
more than 400,000 customers in Arizona. Recently, one of the company's
largest subsidiaries, Tucson Electric Power (TEP), maxed out the capacity
of its primary datacenter. The facility had no more space, cooling
resources or power to support future growth. To address this urgent issue,
TEP deployed the VMware platform and virtualized more than 90 percent of
its application environment. Today, over 330 virtual machines are running
on 53 physical hosts, extending the life of TEP's current datacenter
indefinitely while significantly reducing hardware and maintenance costs.
"Capacity issues in the datacenter were the primary drivers of
virtualization," said Chris Rima, supervisor of the Infrastructure Systems
team at TEP. "The secondary drivers were financial. Lower capital costs
for server builds, better resource utilization, less power per server
instance; all of these factors positively impacted our bottom line. As a
power company, we also recognize and value the environmental benefits of
lower power consumption."
Among the applications that are currently running on the VMware platform
are Blackberry Enterprise Server, GE PowerOn for outage management, IBM
FileNet, IBM Maximo for asset and service management, Microsoft SharePoint
2007, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Hyperion Strategic Finance, Oracle
PeopleSoft, and Symantec Enterprise Vault.
Rima emphasized the mission-critical nature of the virtualization
environment, explaining, "Our power distribution personnel use the GE
PowerOn outage management system to determine how power is routed. This
system ensures that everyone is working from the same blueprint. Our
dispatchers rely on the PowerOn system to send the field techs to the right
location to restore power safely. And we rely on VMware to help keep these
systems up and running at all times."
Virtualization is also providing TEP with invaluable backup and recovery
benefits. Before going virtual, the backup and recovery process for the GE
PowerOn outage management system was manual. It could take all night to
backup data and move it to the disaster-recovery facility and three or four
hours to complete a full failover. In the meantime, dispatchers would have
to refer to physical maps instead of electronic data. Thanks to
virtualization, the backup process is much simpler. Processes that used to
take several hours to complete are now done automatically every 15 minutes
so TEP is always prepared in case of an emergency.
"Virtualization has been a lifesaver," said Tony Edelbrock, senior systems
administrator at TEP. "It has revolutionized the way we do things. Several
of the backup processes were eliminated with the new architecture. The
resources that had been used to do backups for several hours every night
can now be applied to more strategic tasks."
About Vmware
VMware (NYSE : VMW ) is the global leader in virtualization solutions from
the desktop to the datacenter--bringing cloud computing to businesses of
all sizes. Customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating
expenses, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green.
With 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion, more than 130,000 customers and more
than 22,000 partners, VMware is one of the fastest growing public software
companies. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is majority-owned
by EMC Corporation (NYSE : EMC ). For more information, visit
www.vmware.com.
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