Virtualization Initiative Earns Thompson Reuters High Marks

Thanks for coming back! While here, you may want our Free Whitepaper.

They’re doing good things over at Thompson Reuters.

Christopher Crowhurst, VP of architecture and business systems infrastructure, evidently saw the writing on the wall when IT infrastructure growth was outpacing revenue growth by almost two to one. Crowhurst sprang into action, creating a mega virtualization initiative that would would reduce storage sprawl while ensuring IT operations complied with Thompson Reuter’s green IT goals.

So how did he do it?

One project focused on storage optimizitation.  Crowhurst doubled utilization from 30% to 60% and reduced disk costs by transitioning 40% of data to lower-cost storage.

The other project focused on server virtulization. Crowhurst moved about 30% of the total physical servers to virtual servers - and he paid for it by storage optimization savings.

In the end, Thomson Reuters achieved 77% utilization across backup systems, reclaimed 159TB of storage through deduplication, and reduced annual capital and operating expenses by a combined $12 million per year. On the “green IT” front, the expected accumulated power savings over eight years will let the company defer building three new datacenters at the cost of $60 million each and reduce carbon emissions and load on the power grid.

Wow! How’s that for a day at the office?

No wonder Crowhurst was recently awarded 2009 InfoWorld CTO 25 Award. Quite an honor for a man who’s accomplished so much over at Thompson Reuters.

In this EMC news-dominated world, it’s nice to hear about other people and companies doing good work.

Perhaps we’ll hear more about Thompson Rueters and less about the other guys in the months ahead.

Tagged as: storage optimization, storage sprawl thompson reuters, virtualization initiative, Virtualization Management