AccuWeather
Date
:
8/1/2010
Because of the Intel 5520 processors, the Dell PowerEdge M610 blades are giving us four to six times the performance, in a much smaller form factor, compared with our prior-generation servers.
— Christopher Patti, director of technology, AccuWeather, Inc., United States
Challenge
Producing localized weather forecasts every hour for 2.7 million locations worldwide is a data-intensive business. As successful forecast provider AccuWeather, Inc. grew, the company encountered challenges of increased space, power and cooling requirements for its legacy server environment.Solution
The company consolidated its legacy servers onto a combination of Dell™ PowerEdge™ servers, all with Intel® Xeon® processors. Supported by Dell EqualLogic™ PS Series storage area networks (SANs), the company's new IT infrastructure includes a VMware® cluster of 150 virtual machines, saving AccuWeather space, power and a lot of IT staff time.Benefits
- Fourfold to sixfold increase in server performance compared with previous generation
- 50 percent less power consumption by each blade server
- 40 percent average CPU utilization rate, up from 13 percent
- 70 percent projected average CPU utilization rate after virtual machines are moved to blade servers
- 38 percent less IT staff time spent on tech support
- 87 percent faster rollout of application testing environment (two hours versus two days)
- Sixfold increase in size of development and testing environment
- 80 percent reduction in time spent on storage administration
