“For nearly 150 years, the grape growers at Welch’s have been leaders in the manufacturing of juice and jelly. What may be less known is that the Concord, Mass.-based company, whose formal corporate name is Welch Foods Inc., is also pioneering the adoption of server virtualization technology. By removing its IBM mainframe and iSeries midrange servers - and running multiple operating systems and applications on single x86 servers - the company’s maintenance costs have dropped by 50%, said Carmine Iannace, Welch’s manager of IT architecture.

“The virtualization software it runs - VMware ESX Server - has added a 30% to 35% savings on top of that. In an interview, Iannace talked about this and other projects in Welch’s quest to make its multi-OS environment more efficient for the long haul.” [Read more..]