Insurance Firm Uses Virtualization to Streamline Server Provisioning, Drive Agility

Overview

In business since 1917, today Alecta is the largest occupational pension provider in Sweden. The company's data center, located at headquarters in Stockholm, houses more than 100 older, underutilized servers. Alecta's IT staff deployed a Microsoft virtualization solution to improve hardware utilization, streamline server provisioning, and increase agility in responding to business directives. The team replaced aging machines with servers running the Windows Server 2003 R2 Datacenter x64 Edition operating system. Taking advantage of the operating system's unlimited virtualization rights, Alecta has increased the scalability of its virtualized infrastructure. Using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, IT staff now can provision servers in an hour instead of a week, providing unprecedented service levels to the organization.