In my recent post, VM6 - taming virtual environments for the midmarket, I presented VM6 Software and its product VMex 2.1. I’ve since had a chance to communicate with Christian Boivin, VP of JLR Recherche Immobilière, about VM6 and its products. Here’s what he had to say. Thanks, Christian, for taking the time.
Please introduce your organization and the role you play there.
My name is Christian Boivin and I’m the vice president of JLR Recherche Immobilière
What are you doing that needed this technology?
JLR Recherche Immobilière collects, compiles, and distributes real estate transactions published at the Land Registry of Quebec, Canada. JLR’s transactional website enables its subscribers to get online access to transactions published at the Land Registry Office of Quebec. In 2009, we completed an integration of more than 85 percent of properties in the U.S., making it one of the largest distributors of real estate data in Canada.
Our IT infrastructure was depreciating and running on cheap clone computers and servers. Our business was growing fast, and we needed an IT infrastructure that could scale as we continued to grow, which our current infrastructure did not allow.
What products did you consider?
We were looking at virtualization solutions for two mains reasons: first for consolidation and secondly for high availability. We needed to completely renew our IT infrastructure and have it highly available. We looked at both the VMware and Microsoft solutions, but they were both complex and required a considerable investment.
Why did you select this product?
We selected VM6 Software’s VM6 VMex because it is the only product that allows shared storage, server virtualization, simple management and built-in monitoring in one solution. We didn’t need to hire new staff with more expertise, and because we were already running Windows Server 2008, we were able to leverage Hyper-V and the staff we had on hand. It was also easy to install and because the interface is Windows based, it was easy to learn.
VM6 VMex allowed us to virtualize and consolidate most of our production workload and all of our development servers. VM6 VMex offered a 70 percent lower cost than the VMware-based solution, as well, which was obviously more cost-effective for us.
What tangible benefits have you received through the use of this product?
VM6 VMex has given us a completely virtualized infrastructure right out of the box. Its continuous real-time replication has given us an affordable, high-availability solution that has mitigated any risk of data loss due to a hardware failure. Our on-staff MSCE had it up and running and trained on the solution within a few hours. At 70 percent lower total cost of ownership than the other solutions, the return on investment has already been proven.
As our business is growing, we are currently putting in a disaster recovery (DR) site that would take over the production load in case of disaster from our primary site. VM6 VMex is optimized for multisite or distributed environment and can be centrally managed, which will enable us to build a DR site with the same kind of savings and flexibility that we reached with our main production site.
What advice would you offer others facing similar circumstances?
Do your research. Many small- and mid-sized businesses (SMB) often only think about the big players in the virtualization space. While those vendors claim to offer a solution for the SMB market, their products are still the same as their enterprise products, but with less functionality. There are vendors out there who cater specifically to the SMB market and who have developed products that are both cost-effective and have the same or even better performance functionality than the major players. It’s worth the time to research these companies. Also, choose your partner or reseller carefully. Many will be pleased to sell you a more complex solution where they can sell you more of their expensive professional services, instead of thinking about your needs first.
