Upgrading and virtualising to save money

The Microsoft worldwide case studies site always throws up some interesting things to read. But a couple of weeks ago I noticed that a new case study of a UK school had been published by our services team, in partnership with Dell. It’s from Lodge Park Technology College, in Northants, and tells the story of their adoption of Windows 7 and the virtualisation of their servers – and how that saved them money.

You’ll probably want to read the full case study for the details, but here’s the highlights I picked up on.

Virtualising Servers saves money

They are saving £6,000-£10,000 every year on hardware by virtualising their servers. As Stephen Peverett, the Network Manager, says:

	I used to work on a four-year lifecycle for servers alone. With 20 servers, we were replacing six servers a year at approximately £2,000 per server. If I can reduce those 20 servers with six machines running virtual servers I’m cutting my costs by more than half.

I think the savings are actually greater than Stephen quotes – because it will have saved them around £20,000 a year on electricity – because it’s reduced the need for air-conditioning, and moved to six physical servers from 20.

And the virtualisation also adds a new capability to update and repair servers with no downtime. This issue has become more and more critical in schools, when students and staff are accessing learning platforms and other systems 24-hours a day. There’s not even a mid-summer break when systems can be shutdown for maintenance.

Upgrading to Windows 7 extends the life of hardware

The ability to run Windows 7 on older computers will further increase savings.

	We don’t have to upgrade our hardware to run Windows 7. And it works well with both existing and new hardware. The ICT suites equipped with Windows 7 are extremely popular with students. Windows 7 will be a catalyst for collaboration and help our students work faster

Read the full Lodge Park case study on the Microsoft.com website