Growing Colorado City Turns to DxEnterprise Software to Achieve Greater Management Consistency and Efficiency Across Microsoft SQL Server Environment
FORT COLLINS, Colo., Dec. 15, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- DH2i™ Company, recently named a Cool Vendor by Gartner in the "Cool Vendors in Servers and Virtualization, 20151" report, today announced that the City of Westminster, Colorado has selected its DxEnterprise™ container management software to help streamline and enhance the management of its IT operations in order to ensure the consistent delivery of its citywide services. The DxEnterprise software solution now being implemented across the city's Microsoft SQL Server environment will enable consistency across 90% of its SQL databases and save about 180 man-hours a year.
Just nine miles from the Colorado state capital, the City of Westminster is the seventh most populous city in the state. With its fast-growing population of more than 100,000, the city works hard to support its residents with a wide range of city services. From library, police and fire services to utilities, parks and recreation and its court system, the City of Westminster operates a host of unique business applications, each with distinct needs and operational requirements. As a result, the city's IT database infrastructure had become a scattered environment that was difficult to manage, maintain and support. A critical component of the city's IT operations was and still is its Dell-based server and storage infrastructure, utilizing VMware virtualization, and supporting more than 38 instances of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 and 2012.
"With a growing infrastructure we were looking to achieve greater consistency across our SQL databases for better ease of use, maintenance, backups and management overall," said Art Rea, software engineering manager, City of Westminster. "To support our 38 SQL instances we have multiple team members - each performing maintenance and management in a different way. We needed a more consistent layout that would help our team become more efficient, while also supporting better failover so that we would be able to meet our 99.9% uptime goals."
To meet its requirements, the city began to evaluate container solutions to consolidate its virtualized instances for greater manageability and license and infrastructure savings. They learned about DH2i's DxEnterprise from a neighboring city that had already successfully leveraged the solution, and were eager to take a closer look. DxEnterprise's flexibility, ease of use and failover capabilities sounded very attractive. And, upon hands-on testing of the software in the DH2i Sandbox Lab, the City of Westminster IT team was even more impressed. That's when they began to crunch the numbers.
"We talked with a couple other vendors who suggested various solutions. However, all these other solutions required that we upgrade to SQL Server Enterprise to realize the benefits we needed. Of course, that made those solutions cost prohibitive," said Carmen Zukas, lead software engineer, City of Westminster. "Yet with DH2i we could use our current SQL Server editions while achieving greater cost and time savings. In fact, we estimate a savings of about 180 man-hours a year through the greater management efficiency that the DH2i solution enables."
Among the features the City of Westminster loves most about DxEnterprise is that it gives their team a consistent view across their entire environment – from its JD Edwards financial and HR applications, Alpine Software fire department management application, Advanced Utility Billing System and Accela's Asset Management System, and more. With a single login, they can monitor and manage everything, from roll-out to production to remote backup. Future upgrades will also be made significantly easier with the new DH2i container management system and if issues arise they have the peace of mind that they can just hit the "undo" button to roll back to a previous state without impacting anything in the production environment. Moreover, support has been above and beyond any they have experience from most of their current vendors. Whenever a question has arisen, the DH2i team has proven itself to be highly responsive, knowledgeable and dedicated to fast and satisfactory resolution.
"The City of Westminster did their homework – comparing DH2i's DxEnterprise to that from Microsoft and other potential vendors. On paper, DH2i was clearly the winner from a capabilities, pricing and ROI standpoint," said Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder of DH2i. However, the real proof came when they were able to test it firsthand in the DH2i Lab. Then, they could see for themselves exactly how DxEnterprise would deliver – particularly across the areas that were most important to them such as management ease-of-use, as well as consistency, maintenance, migration, failover and disaster recovery capabilities."
And, what of the future?
"The tech world is changing at such an incredible pace, which not surprisingly is driving the incoming requests from our users who are becoming more and more tech savvy. We have been adding about two or more brand new applications a year, which we expect will continue. This is on top of what we already support," added Rea. "The time and money we save with the DH2i solution, not to mention the capabilities it enables, will help us to stay ready to respond, if not one step ahead."
Tweet this: .@westminsterco saves 180 man-hours a year w/ @DH2i DxEnterprise Container Management Software - see for yourself: http://dh2i.com/product-tour-and-free-trial/
About DH2i
DH2i Company™ is the leading provider of Microsoft Windows Server application portability and management solutions. Its flagship solution, DxEnterprise™, containerizes and decouples Microsoft Windows Server applications and data from the host OS and underlying IT infrastructure. This decoupling provides users with the ability to move their traditional enterprise applications such as SQL Server or new multi-container-based applications with data from any host, to any host, anywhere with near-zero downtime maintaining a consistent application connection endpoint. In doing so, customers are able to better consolidate their environment, build and manage hybrid physical, virtual and/or cloud environments, dramatically simplify management, and ensure service level agreements (SLAs). The bottom line for customers equals a 30%-70% reduction in software and related infrastructure costs, ensured application availability, and a 70%+ increase in application management productivity. DH2i is included in the list of Cool Vendors in the "Cool Vendors in Servers and Virtualization, 20151" report by Gartner, Inc. To learn more, please visit the DH2i website: www.dh2i.com, call: 970-295-4505 or +44 20 3318 9204, or email: [email protected].
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[1]"Cool Vendors in Servers and Virtualization, 2015″ by Philip Dawson, Thomas J. Bittman, George J. Weiss and Andrew Butler, April 16, 2015
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© DH2i Company 2015. DH2i, DxEnterprise, DxConsole, DxHADR, DxTransfer, DxCollect and InstanceMobility are trademarks of DH2i Company. All other brand or product names contained in this press release may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
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