VMware Inc. announced that the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA), an independent support agency within the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), has virtualized nearly 100 percent of its server infrastructure using VMware Infrastructure. DCMA also has used the software suite's capabilities to lower data center capital and operating costs, achieve high server utilization and automate data center management. "DCMA has a duty to spend taxpayer money wisely while keeping the infrastructure running on a daily basis, and VMware Infrastructure allows us to do that," said Mike Williams, CIO at DCMA. "Virtualization is a key component of our data center strategy and a cost-efficient way for us to accommodate agency growth without requiring additional data center space." Williams and his team set out to consolidate DCMA's 17 data centers located around the world down to three, and so far the agency has consolidated 560 servers to 160 en route to its consolidation goal. With VMware Infrastructure, DCMA has offset server hardware maintenance and upgrade costs while simplifying data center management and emergency recovery procedures. "DCMA has really leveraged VMware Infrastructure and as a result has seen huge return on investment. Now DCMA is taking the next step and using VMware Infrastructure to accomplish disaster recovery just as effectively as it is being leveraged by many other government agencies," said Aileen Black, vice president of Federal Sales at VMware. "VMware Infrastructure hits the sweet spot for government CIOs, offering a means for substantial capital and operational cost savings over physical infrastructure as well as increased service levels, better application availability and the flexibility to meet new data center needs." DCMA currently is upgrading to VMware Infrastructure 3, the third generation of infrastructure virtualization software suite that virtualizes servers, storage and networking, allowing multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources. The suite of products includes VMware VMotion technology, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMware High Availability (HA). VMware DRS and VMware VMotion technology dynamically aggregate hardware resources into logical resource pools and optimally allocate them to applications running in virtual machines. These products are designed to allow DCMA to achieve service levels that were not possible with physical infrastructure. VMware HA eliminates single points of hardware failure by automatically relocating and restarting virtual machines. VMware HA is designed to provide uniform high availability across the entire virtualized infrastructure without the cost and complexity of failover solutions tied either to operating systems or specific applications.