Virtualization has proven to be the weapon of choice when it comes to minimizing man-hours and increasing productivity  Just ask Doug Westhoff of  Brown Shoe.  He’ll tell you all about it.

“Before, we had our traditional desktop setup, where you had an end user.” Westhoff said.  “The IT department would run a refresh every three years, and you know, after three years, that machine would be cluttered with malware.  This was one of the reasons we wanted to look into VDI.”

After moving an office down from Wisconsin to St. Louis and test running a handful of virtual desktops, Westhoff was greeted with some very pleasing results.

“The call center was really our test bed. We went through some growing pains with the shared storage and some other things. After we worked the bugs out, we bought five new computers and ran two as desktops and three as virtual machines.  We put five of our best users on them, and ran them for three weeks.  At the end of three weeks, we crunched all the numbers and the virtual desktops beat the physical desktops by thirty seconds per call, per user.  That’s straight performance.  After we ran the numbers for the whole call center we came back with a savings equal to two full time employees.” He said.

Westhoff continued by explaining that virtualization isn’t just about saving money on the user end.  It’s also about saving tome in the IT department.

“There was one time I was sitting in a meeting, and my boss’s boss came in and told me there was a girl who got a virus on her virtual machine. He pulled me out of the meeting, I walked over there, I had her log off, then I deleted the virtual machine and had her log back on.  I walked away. With our setup, a user can log on to multiple machines.  I had the problem fixed in thirty seconds.”

While Westhoff says that his company has “a long way to go” when it comes to virtualization, (Brown Shoe’s virtualization deployment hovers somewhere around twenty percent.)  His testimony is proof positive that not only does virtualization work, it would be hard to call it anything but preferable in corporate environments.