Delivering the Goods

“With help from Dell, we’ve been able to make affordable upgrades that give us some of the IT capabilities of a much larger firm. That helps our company grow, take on new challenges, and ultimately win more shelf space for the products we distribute.”

- Tim Owens, infrastructure manager, Columbia Distributing Company

A huge increase in data processing and storage demands generated by increased business and new sales support technologies threatened to overburden Columbia’s direct attach storage and aging server resources.

Columbia implemented a virtual environment using Dell^TM  PowerEdge^TM  servers and a Dell EqualLogic^TM  storage area network (SAN) to enable rapid deployment of new servers and storage capacity and help eliminate downtime.

• Get IT Faster: Dell Services helped reduce implementation time by 35 percent
• Run IT Better: Dell solution helped reduce new server deployment time from as much as two weeks down to 15 minutes, saving approximately US$2,500 in IT costs per deployment; SAN ease-of-use saved an estimated 90 percent in administrative time
• Grow IT Smarter: Virtualization eliminated 17 physical servers and cut energy costs by 65 percent; Dell EqualLogic SAN helped improve storage utilization by an estimate