VMware Helps Riverstone Residential Grow its Business
Business Growing 100 Percent Annually, Riverstone Needed Scalable IT Platform and High-Performance, High-Availability Application Environment
PALO ALTO, Calif. —December 16, 2008– VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that Riverstone Residential Group (RRG), the largest privately owned residential management company in the United States, has virtualized nearly its entire Windows application environment on VMware’s industry-leading management and virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure 3.
RRG manages over 192,000 apartment units in 29 states and the District of Columbia. The company’s aggressive acquisition strategy has resulted in a compound annual growth rate of more than 100 percent. That rapid growth has put a heavy strain on the company’s server and Storage Area Network (SAN) resources, and pushed RRG’s datacenter to its limits. Since deploying VMware Infrastructure, disk failures that had been commonplace were replaced with increased application availability. Along the way, dozens of hardware servers have been consolidated onto four physical hosts running 84 virtual machines (VMs).
“We can’t say enough great things about VMware,” said Ty Brewer, chief information officer at Riverstone Residential. “It’s been a big part of our company’s success. We now have the flexibility and scalability to support our rapid growth. Instead of 7-10 days to buy, install and configure a new box, we can provision new VMs in less than an hour. That makes IT much more responsive to the business. And the pooling of virtual resources has eliminated concerns about disk failures. In fact, VMware Infrastructure has performed so well that it’s now a core component of our disaster-recovery strategy.”
Over 95 percent of RRG’s application environment is virtualized, including its HR and email systems and its mission-critical property-management application from Yardi Systems. The entire application environment is Windows-based, which is why RRG looked at Microsoft Hyper-V as well as VMware Infrastructure when it began evaluating virtualization solutions.
“It came down to reliability and maturity,” said Brewer. “We can trust VMware because it’s battle tested. And the toolset in VMware Infrastructure is head and shoulders above anything else on the market. VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, VirtualCenter -- all these tools have great value. They automate much of the virtualized environment and they greatly simplify management. VMware has been a big win for us and a key enabler of our growth.”
Brewer estimates that RRG didn’t have half the hardware it needed to meet its growth objectives when he joined the company. However, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on more hardware, the company was actually able to reduce its hardware footprint while increasing its scalability due to VMware. In addition to all the other benefits of virtualization, reducing the amount of hardware has enabled RRG to cut its electricity costs by an estimated $14,000 per year.
About VMware
VMware (NYSE: VMW) is the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter. Customers of all sizes rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2007 revenues of $1.3 billion, more than 120,000 customers and more than 20,000 partners, VMware is one of the fastest growing public software companies. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is majority-owned by EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC). For more information, visit www.vmware.com.
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