Honoring IBM Business Partners worldwide for their ingenuity, innovation, customer satisfaction and outstanding achievements in providing business solutions, a leading provider of server and storage virtualization solutions, Evolving Solutions, has been named winner of the award for "Outstanding Virtualization System Solution" in the annual IBM Beacon Awards competition.

This year's award was won on the strength of an x86 Virtualization Solution designed for a major sugar marketing cooperative. The customer's storage, originally running 20 applications on 30 HP servers, was close to capacity and its datacenter had become hard to manage.

Implementing two four-way IBM System x servers, a SAN solution based on the DS4700, and IBM Director Management Software, Evolving Solutions assessed its server environment. This solution, ultimately, consolidated thirty total servers to two.

The customer can now, as a result of this Beacon Award winning solution, add capacity as their needs grow, improve the manageability of data with centralized storage and provide information to their customers more rapidly thanks to faster access times.

Thanks to the implementation of energy-efficient x3950 servers that reduce the overall energy requirements for heating and cooling the datacenter, backup times have been cut in half and data center operating costs have dropped sharply.

General manager, IBM Global Business Partners, Ravi Marwaha, said: "As an IBM Beacon Award winner, Evolving Solutions is being recognized as a leader in positioning new technologies and helping clients adopt virtualization as a new standard in their data center". "By helping organizations implement a virtualized platform environment, Evolving Solutions is increasing business value for customers through reduced operating costs and better management of assets."