Costco Uses Virtualization to Save Space, Reduce Costs, and Increase IT Agility
Article
Costco Wholesale Corporation is a major international wholesale distributor with revenues approaching U.S.$70 billion. The complexity of the Costco IT infrastructure has grown along with the business. In addition to the warehouses, the company maintains eight domestic and seven international offices, and the company’s worldwide network includes 13,000 HP Neoware thin client computers and nearly 9,000 end-user computers. By 2006, Costco realized that it needed to control the proliferation of servers in the data center and has since expanded its investment to include Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V™ and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. With these tools, Costco can control IT spending, increase IT flexibility, and manage its virtualized server assets more efficiently.
Virtualization is much more than simply consolidating physical servers and cutting data center costs. At Microsoft, virtualization means helping IT departments maximize ROI and cost savings across the enterprise, and powerfully improving business continuity. That's why we created a portfolio of products that address all aspects of the physical and virtual infrastructure—servers, networks, applications, and desktops—across multiple hypervisors, and that can be easily managed through a centralized console.