Compellent customer Bankadati has won the 'Best Virtualisation and Server Consolidation Project' category at the Best of VMworld Europe 2010 User Awards. The award recognises companies for their use of virtualisation to reduce costs, innovate, and enhance performance and business processes.

Bankadati deployed a virtual server and storage environment powered by VMware ESX and Compellent Fluid Data storage. Bankadati won the award due to the way the new virtualised environment improved application performance, simplified management and introduced business process efficiencies.

More than 80 IT projects were submitted and reviewed for the award. Winners were announced on-site at VMworld Europe in Copenhagen, Denmark, on October 13th.

Key Facts About Bankadati's Winning IT Infrastructure:

Bankadati uses Compellent Automated Tiered Storage to move infrequently accessed data to lower-cost and less power-hungry SATA disks. With the company's previous technology, these tasks had to be performed manually -- based on a trial and error approach. More than 6,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes perform better following the consolidation. Over 70 percent of email now resides on SATA disk. As a result, there is less demand for high-performance storage and more room for applications and data that really needs the performance. The previous solution was so complicated to manage that external consultants were required to help the IT team. Bankadati's new solution has virtually eliminated the need for consultants, while allowing the IT team to focus on strategic business issues rather than SAN management. The Compellent solution has worked perfectly for over 18 months without interruption. The Compellent solution has enabled Bankadati to more than double its disk utilisation, create a large number of virtual servers through its tight integration with VMware, and create a clustered database to protect mission-critical applications.

Quotes:

Christian Manzia, head of departmental systems at Bankadati, comments on the improved efficiency of the business under its new storage environment: "There is always a lack of skilled IT resources. Fortunately, because Compellent Fluid Data automatically manages how we tier our storage, we don't need to be, or need to hire, experts to manage it. The Compellent SAN allows us to better allocate the resources we do have, solving problems more quickly and in line with business needs. It goes without saying that the IT staff now has more time to dedicate to the development of the business" Gianluca Colombo, Compellent's Business Development Manager for Italy, added: "This is yet another example of how Compellent and VMware virtualisation solutions work in harmony to deliver an integrated and easily manageable server and storage environment. Customers like Bankadati are able to go beyond traditional virtualisation and consolidation of physical servers, and enjoy significant performance and efficiency benefits as a result."