Virtualization beats bare metal at wine company

26.02.2007
Online wine storage and trading portal Cellarit Pty Ltd. has migrated its database and applications from physical to virtual servers resulting in a reduction in operating costs and an increase in flexibility.

Cellarit Managing Director Scott Witt said the migration off two physical servers, hosted by Bulletproof Networks Pty Ltd., earlier this month was a success.

"There were a variety of reasons to go virtual," Witt said. "The most immediate was our database server was about to come out of a maintenance contract and was becoming a bit frayed at the edges and needed to be attended to."

With a server reaching the end of its maintenance cycle, Cellarit needed to make a move "one way or another" and with Bulletproof's advice went virtual.

"At the end of the day virtualization made sense and is a cheaper solution on a monthly basis," Witt said. "Effectively, as a virtual customer we are removed from the hardware cycle. If we retained the old cycle, every few years we were forced to evaluate a move to the latest hot box."

Witt said hardware capacity is no longer a concern for Cellarit because "at the end of day we can dial up any usage on the virtual server."