Marketing Firm Optimizes Infrastructure to Cut IT Costs, Boost Uptime

Overview

R.L. Polk is one of the largest consumer marketing firms in the United States and a leading provider of automotive marketing information. To keep up with annual business growth of 30 percent and remain focused on delivering new data services, Polk needed to reduce the time spent deploying and managing servers. Polk deployed Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology to virtualize servers and Microsoft System Center data center solutions to reduce the work of monitoring, configuring, deploying, and backing up both physical and virtual servers. By optimizing its core data center infrastructure, Polk has reduced its IT staff while growing data center capacity 30 percent annually. It has also improved application availability, reduced hardware costs by U.S.$300,000, and achieved faster time-to-market of new services by speeding server deployment.