avoid costly datacenter investments as well. We've also been able to keep our environments more current with less effort and disruption. Before virtualization, we updated the firmware, driver, and OS on each server monthly. This required an hour per server across nearly 700 servers, in addition to the required testing. After virtualization, we update the host firmware on our large frames once or twice a year, with only OS updates occurring monthly. The operational efficiencies have improved more than our datacenter operations; they have also allowed for projects to request a virtual machine via our IT Service Catalogue, and once approved, the automated provisioning is completed within minutes on an available host. Most recently, our product development team--which uses extremely expensive graphics-intensive workstations that cost as much as a new sedan--was able to enjoy better performance that can scale as their projects do by virtualizing their environment rather than purchasing new physical workstations. The VMware horizon solution is easy to enable and manage while the session compression keeps WAN links from saturation. Cloud-Ready Infrastructure - Being 95 percent virtualized in our x86 stack has made those workloads cloud ready. As more cloud providers adopt VMware capabilities, we have the opportunity to move workloads seamlessly from on-premise to cloud. This accelerator of cloud-based IAAS is how we will further transform our services to be more scalable, flexible and cost competitive as we support our changing dealer, customer to employee needs. Technology is changing at such a rapid pace that it's not feasible to predict our business needs three and four years in advance to achieve the best ELA deal. With cloud services, our global IT will scale and adapt with our company rather than retaining and being constrained by underutilized assets. We look forward to continuing our relationship with VMware and Dell Technologies as we continue to evolve our infrastructure in support of our company's mission to build the next generation of riders globally. Tom HardinWe were able to virtualize our older legacy workloads to run on the latest hardware without changing functionality | | December 20189 CIOReview
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