Wells' Dairy Saves More Than $500,000 With Microsoft Virtualization and Management...

Wells' Dairy Saves More Than $500,000 With Microsoft Virtualization and
Management Solutions

Company experiences greater business agility through improved IT manageability
of physical and virtual systems.

REDMOND, Wash., March 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The IT department at Wells'
Dairy Inc., one of the world's largest family-owned and managed ice cream
manufacturer in the United States, is using virtualization and systems
management solutions from Microsoft Corp. to support the business. By
deploying Microsoft virtualization and Microsoft System Center management
software, Wells' Dairy has been able to save more than $500,000 (U.S.) on
hardware and software licensing costs.

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Wells' Dairy, founded in 1913, employs more than 2,500 personnel and is based
in the heartland of America in Le Mars, Iowa, known as the "Ice Cream Capital
of the World." The company wanted to optimize its growing datacenter
operations, improve business continuity and disaster recovery, and build a
more agile IT infrastructure. To do that, the Wells' Dairy IT department
turned to virtualization, a technology allowing several servers to exist on a
single physical piece of hardware yet run independently.

"Our goal is to not only support but grow the business through optimal IT
infrastructure and services," said Mike Kooistra, director of information
services at Wells' Dairy. "We believe that a long-term vision of efficient and
consolidated technologies delivers better value than short-term fixes, and
will allow us to lead our industry from a business and technical standpoint."

After evaluating alternate virtualization software, Wells' Dairy turned to
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to virtualize critical business applications on
Dell PowerEdge servers, and improve manageability of both physical and virtual
IT systems with the System Center suite of management tools. The company is
running an average of 11 virtual machines per physical host across its IT
environment. Mission-critical applications, such as Microsoft Office
SharePoint Server 2007, electronic data interchange systems and plant
maintenance management, run across a highly available cluster of servers to
help ensure business continuity by design. This high-availability clustering
feature comes with Windows Server 2008 and provides high availability for
clusters within a datacenter and can scale to provide high availability for
clusters either within a datacenter or geographically dispersed datacenters.

"Unlimited virtualization for Windows Server 2008 Datacenter and System Center
significantly enhances the value proposition for virtual machine deployment
and ensures that we will continue with this cost-effective and
energy-efficient strategy for the long term," said Kooistra.

Wells' Dairy's IT team has begun to use System Center to manage its
Windows-based IT operations, and utilizes the automation features of System
Center to alert the staff if a virtual or a physical server goes below a
preset service level. Wells' Dairy is also using System Center Data Protection
Manager 2007 to back up its stand-alone Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V servers
and Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 servers.

"We see a long-term alliance between Microsoft and Wells' Dairy along the
virtualization path," said Kooistra. "This is in accordance with our business
strategy to standardize on technologies that support our needs today and that
will grow with us."

"By providing virtualization as part of the server operating system and
management suite, thousands of customers are able to easily integrate
enterprise-level virtualization solutions into their existing IT
infrastructures cost-effectively," said Zane Adam, senior director of
virtualization strategy at Microsoft. "This will help customers to scale out
to highly available enterprise-wide deployments, gaining significant cost and
energy savings."

More information on how Microsoft's server virtualization solution is
approximately one-third of the cost of VMware is available at
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/why/roi/default.mspx.*

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) is the worldwide leader in software,
services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full
potential.

* Based on a comparison of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise with Hyper-V and
Microsoft System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise with VMware's
VMware Infrastructure Enterprise with VMware vCenter Server. Includes two
years' support costs for both. Based on Microsoft estimated retail prices and
published VMware prices available at https://www.vmware.com/vmwarestore as of
Feb. 4, 2009. Actual reseller prices may vary.

SOURCE Microsoft Corp.

Rapid Response Team of Waggener Edstrom Worldwide, +1-503-443-7070,
rrt@waggeneredstrom.com, for Microsoft Corp.