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Close-Up on Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
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Solvay Pharmaceuticals, Inc., depends on its IT infrastructure to support a growing research and development program, but it's a challenge to quickly deploy the latest applications to keep up with that growth.
"Ours is a highly regulated industry, and we are required to put most applications on separate servers," says Bruce McMillan, Solvay's manager of emerging technologies. "With most servers supporting only a single application, server sprawl soon became a problem. At the same time, we could not react quickly enough to meet the volume of new server and application requests."
Solvay consolidated 65 physical servers down to 17 using VMware* virtualization software on IntelŽ technology-based servers, hosting an average of 12 virtual machines per server. The team also added 102 virtual machines, for a total of 150 virtual machines. After testing the four-socket HP ProLiant* DL580 server with the Quad-Core IntelŽ XeonŽ processor 7300 series, Solvay expects to fit 20 to 25 virtual machines on each of those servers.
"The Intel Xeon processors gave us the power to virtualize our environment and eliminate server sprawl," says McMillan. "The server consolidation, together with the energy efficiency of the Intel processors, helped us put more processing capacity in our data center while reducing overall energy requirements. We estimate annual power and cooling cost savings of more than USD 67,000."