VMware announced that CITOC, a provider of managed and hosted IT solutions, has standardized on VMware's management and virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure, as its application environment for internal systems and client solutions.

Houston-based CITOC is a certified partner of both VMware and Microsoft and provides IT solutions to some of the country's most respected companies, including Lockheed Martin, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Sysco Foods and Carriage Services. With the emergence of virtualization as an essential component of IT environments, CITOC evaluated a number of virtualization platforms to incorporate into its IT operations, including VMware Infrastructure and Microsoft Hyper-V. CITOC opted to standardize on the VMware platform for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that CITOC could run three times as many virtual machines on VMware Infrastructure as it could on Microsoft Hyper-V with identical hardware.

"VMware provides the most reliable and robust virtualization platform, hands down," said James Garrett, chief operating officer at CITOC. "We guarantee our clients 99.999-percent application availability. VMware makes that possible with capabilities like Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), VMotion and Site Recovery Manager (SRM). VMware also provides superior manageability with its VirtualCenter, and it enables us to provision virtual machines in less than five minutes. For a complete virtualization solution, you need an outstanding hypervisor and all the tools to ensure availability, recoverability and great performance. VMware separates itself from the crowd by providing that complete solution."

Garrett estimates that CITOC is hosting nearly 5,000 virtual machines for its customers. Approximately 85 percent of those virtual machines are running Microsoft Windows-based applications. Internally, CITOC is running its own business-critical applications on the VMware platform, including Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft SQL Server, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and ConnectWise for business automation.

CITOC has also set up a pre-production environment with VMware Lab Manager for cost-effective testing and training. This virtualized development environment minimizes the hardware that CITOC must dedicate to non-production uses.

"The breadth of VMware's virtualization product suite is unmatched," said Garrett. "And it just makes so much sense. A few years ago, we had to educate people on the merits of virtualization. That's no longer the case. People understand the tremendous financial and operational benefits. We save our typical customers 70-80 percent by building virtual solutions rather than hardware-based solutions. For small-to-midsize companies in particular, that's a hard value proposition to ignore."

Garrett recalled one recent customer that was running 343 physical machines when it hired CITOC to streamline its IT operations. Today, the customer is supporting its entire application environment with 16 blade servers (32 including redundancy) running VMware Infrastructure.