National Association of Home Builders Saves Time, Money with Virtualization Technology

HERNDON, Va., March 2007 – The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates setting up new virtual environments using SWsoft Virtuozzo operating system virtualization takes about 15 minutes – a dramatic decrease in time compared to one week in the past to set up a dedicated server.

In addition to this rapid deployment capability, savings on servers, software and support costs are estimated at $6,000 per server according to John Yanekian, director of network services at NAHB.

NAHB consolidated several small servers that were running single applications providing specialty functions required by some users. These applications could not co-exist on the same server because there were issues related to port contention or memory space.

"For one reason or another, we would have needed dedicated servers before using Virtuozzo, which gives us the flexibility we need to set up virtual environments and isolate these applications so they can co-exist and run on the same physical server," said John Yanekian.

Along with SWsoft Virtuozzo, NAHB evaluated virtualization technologies from VMware and Microsoft, and chose Virtuozzo for Windows because it offered the best performance and cost efficiency.

"We didn't see any degradation in terms of hardware performance," said Yanekian.

Currently, NAHB has about 10 virtual environments on each physical server running Virtuozzo. Virtualized workloads include database applications for accounting and budgeting, Web servers, an application for video files, as well as development work.

"Now, it's easy for us to accommodate requests for new applications by simply setting up a virtual environment," said Yanekian. "That's important to our 350 users and 250,000 members of the association."

Using Virtuozzo allows Yanekian to back up and migrate virtual environments as part of planned or unplanned downtime events and he says there are "no worries" over how long a server is down because applications continue running in a different virtual environment.

Each server at NAHB is a standard configuration running Windows on an HP dual CPU with eight megabytes of memory and 150 gigabytes of storage.

Virtualization Performance and Manageability
With SWsoft Virtuozzo, a single operating system instance can be dynamically partitioned into multiple, highly-efficient and scalable virtual environments. Virtuozzo includes patented technology that enables density of up to hundreds of virtual environments on a single physical server.

Unlike virtual machines and hypervisors, Virtuozzo addresses the challenges faced by today's datacenters of operating system sprawl. Its unique architecture and management tools make it the ideal solution for provisioning, monitoring and managing virtualized server resources.

About SWsoft
SWsoft is a global leader in virtualization and automation software. More than 10,000 customers rely on the proven performance and management capabilities of SWsoft products to optimize their use of IT. Founded in 1999, the company has offices located throughout North America, Europe and Asia. For more information, call 703-815-5670 or visit www.swsoft.com