Accounting for the Future

While IT organizations often struggle to do more with less, finance departments are traditionally wary of new technology investments. This is not the case, however, at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), a nonprofit organization of more than 330,000 members that sought to consolidate 250 Web and application servers onto a scalable server and storage infrastructure and improve online service availability.

This case study describes how the AICPA migrated an aging infrastructure of 250 stand-alone HP servers to just five Dell^TM  PowerEdge^TM  6850 servers with Intel,^®  Xeon^®  processors running VMware^®  virtualization software, using PlateSpin^®  software from Novell to accelerate the process. The organization also deployed Dell/EMC CX300 and Dell/EMC CX3-10c storage area networks (SANs) as well as Dell desktops and laptops—making them completely a Dell organization. To support new initiatives, the AICPA added a Dell PowerEdge M1000e modular blade enclosure with PowerEdge M600 and PowerEdge M605 blade servers. The AICPA was impressed with how easy the blade servers were to set up: Dell Deployment Services came to the site to verify that the systems were properly configured, but AICPA staff members were able to perform the installation themselves.

As a result of the migration, the AICPA reduced its hardware footprint by 98 percent and saved over US$3 million while reducing systems administration time by approximately 60 percent. Using VMware vMotion^TM  technology for load balancing and failover enables the AICPA to provide 99.999 percent uptime for its Web sites and accounting certification services. Thanks to its powerful, scalable, and compact Dell infrastructure, the AICPA can now take on new IT projects that it couldn’t have considered before, and is in prime position to continue to enhance the services it delivers to its members.

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