Christian Messer was a virtualization skeptic not long ago. Now he swears by virtual servers. "I was very skeptical. I think it's more mentality than anything else," says Messer, who is leading a server and storage virtualization project at G&J Pepsi Cola Bottling Company in Cincinnati. "It was more of a lack of understanding on my part. As I got it in a lab environment and began playing with it, my confidence level grew." Messer, manager of information systems at G&J, explains that he had suffered numerous system crashes with Microsoft Exchange on physical servers and wasn't sure how it would perform on virtual ones. But the performance turned out to be fine, and virtualization has allowed Messer to drastically reduce disaster recovery times. "I did a test employment with Exchange 2007 in a virtual machine environment and I got incredible results," he says. "Its performance was outstanding. I've got a much higher comfort level now with virtual machines than with physical servers. I'm able to leverage a lot more of my technology and get some ROI, which looks great to the accountants." G&J is an independent bottler with more than 1,000 employees,
展开▼
