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Close-Up on First American Corporation

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As the pace of its software development increased, First American Corporation's IT staff was challenged with increasing demand for new servers. "Ordering and deploying new hardware could take two weeks or more," says Aaron Andrews, First American's director of distributed systems. "We needed to speed up the process to meet the demands of our business units. But at the same time, we were looking for ways of driving down IT costs."

Andrews' team decided to address these challenges by virtualizing the infrastructure and evaluating hardware and software options from several vendors. The team standardized on the VMware Infrastructure 3* virtualization suite running on 4-socket HP BL680c* blade servers with the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 7300 series. "Our testing showed that we could improve performance up to 50 percent by moving from our dual-core processors to Intel quad-core processors in the new virtualized environment," says Andrews. "We could pack more processing power into the same space and place more virtual machines on each server.

"With the quad-core Intel processor-based servers, First American plans to put approximately 22 virtual machines (VMs) on each blade. "That would be 180 VMs in a 10u blade chassis," says Andrews. "With our previous 2u rack servers, the same capacity would have required four or five full racks worth of space."