BC2726

Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling IT Resources with VMware

Burt's Bees has grown from humble beginnings selling honey and homemade candles into the number one brand in natural personal care products, with 2007 retail sales of $250 million. Rapid company expansion, 100% annual data growth exposed waste and inefficiencies in the company's use of IT resources—which wasn't just poor business practice, but anathema to the company's philosophy of sustainability. To use its server resources more efficiently and reduce its server footprint, Burt's Bees moved core applications into a virtual server environment based on VMware and implemented a shared storage environment. By combining flexible volumes and deduplication technologies with VMware, Burt's Bees has reduced duplicates and storage capacity needed to support each VM by 50%. This has enabled Burt's Bees to store more data on fewer devices and increase the number of virtual servers it runs on each ESX server from three to nine. At the same time, the company implemented a more robust off-site backup and recovery system, switching from direct-attached storage to a shared storage environment. In this session, attendees will learn how Burt's Bees implemented data deduplication, storage virtualization, and flexible volumes to reduce its physical storage footprint and gain maximum value from the company's VMware investment.

Technical Overview Session

Networking; Storage / Backup; VMware Infrastructure; Virtualization Platform / Hypervisor

1 Hour

Tres Vance( Burt'sBees )

Tres Vance has been actively engaged in the IT industry for over a decade. He has had heavy involvement in business and academic computing focused on architecture of integrated systems. Tres' current position as Manager of Technical Infrastructure has also put him at the forefront of Greener IT. He is technologically progressive in the use of technologies such as NetApp Ontap, VMware virtual infrastructure and application architectures to achieve more sustainable computing environments.