In the wake of Black Friday and Cyber Monday it seems only fitting to talk about a case study recently posted on the Microsoft Case Studies site that describes how British retailer Paul Smith saved $1.8 million in the first year after expanding its virtualized environment and migrating to a private cloud strategy.

The company’s store network reaches 40 countries with more than 1,200 employees and an IT staff of 15 technologists. Starting in 2008 the IT group began to virtualize its servers with a goal of achieving a density of 28 virtual machines per host. By 2011 it had successfully migrated half of its servers. Deciding that they needed to drive costs down even further with more savings in fewer physical servers, lower power consumption, eliminating hardware maintenance and more by reaching a virtualization level of 80 percent.

The case study explains how Paul Smith joined the Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program for Windows Server 2012 to enable it to use the more flexible and powerful virtualization technologies available in the newest version of Windows Server. Windows Server 2012 also enables a strategy to transform the company's data centers into a cloud platform capable of supporting large, high-performance virtual machines.

“The RDP was a perfect way for Paul Smith to see how the latest version of Windows Server could help them take their virtualization plans to the next level,” explains Richard Proud, Director at Risual, the Microsoft Partner engaged by Paul Smith to help accomplish their migration. “The new version of Hyper-V has capabilities and features that Paul Smith can use to increase the density and performance of virtual machines per server. It also has better memory management capabilities and efficient tools to further optimize their data centers and reduce administration overhead.”

The resulting statistics are impressive.  According to the case study, Paul Smith increased performance by 10 percent while increasing virtual machine density by 200 percent. Perhaps most impressive is that the retailer reduced its costs by $1.8 million in the first year, and that was just at their headquarters location. The company anticipates even greater cost savings as it continues to deploy new technology to its entire global store network.