Art.com Selects Kovarus to Implement Server Consolidation Solution Featuring VMware

South San Francisco, CA - January 1, 2007 - Art.com is the provider of framed art, posters and prints, with 2005 revenues of over $100 million. Since 1995, Art.com, Inc. has helped more than 4 million customers decorate their walls from the world’s largest collection of art imagery. Its selection of over 400,000 items includes nearly every imaginable topic, from art reproductions to decorative prints to specialty posters.

Over the past decade, the company has expanded to include three core brands: Art.com, AllPosters.com, and Poster.de, with operations in seven locations throughout the United States and in Europe, and over 500 employees worldwide. These three brands collectively service a broad spectrum of consumers, helping decorate homes, offices, apartments and bedrooms all over the world.

With the goal of making art accessible to everyone, Art.com operates two data center facilities. In addition, the consumer demand has translated into page views that often surpass 500 million per month.As with many successful web-based companies, Art.com is continually challenged with the need to expand its system capacity,  cost-effectively manage data and ultimately provide high customer service levels while planning new site features and future expansion of operations and product lines.

In the beginning of 2006, Art.com began planning a physical move of its Raleigh, North Carolina data center to Columbus, Ohio, where its fulfillment center resides. At the same time, the company recognized the physical capacity limitations of its California data center and needed a solution that would meet its high-availability requirements.

Server sprawl was a severe drain on the company’s resources including space, power, cooling and finances. “In order to keep up with the rapid growth of our business, while ensuring zero downtime, we kept throwing new hardware in our data centers to handle capacity. This resulted in inefficient asset utilization and the outgrowth of our West coast data center,” said Alex Lange, Art.com Vice President, Information Technology & Chief Architect. “We desperately needed to consolidate servers to increase capacity without increasing the footprint.”

Art.com had been working with Kovarus, Inc., a technology integrator specializing in enterprise storage, in its Storage Area Network (SAN) when it hit a bump in the road and had to deploy a solution to address its maximized server capacity and data center move. As a leader in delivering server consolidation, data containment, data management and data protection solutions, Kovarus helped Art.com with its decision  to use VMware to optimize its current technology, improve its footprint, increase utilization and reduce IT costs. “Kovarus did a good job of explaining the value of server consolidation and virtualization to us, and they helped us in making our final decision to select VMware over Microsoft, given its more mature and stable platform,” added Mr. Lange.

VMware Product Helps Art.com Minimize Missed Sales Opportunities with Ability to Create Test, Development & Staging Environment

Prior to the implementation of VMware, Art.com’s North Carolina data center consisted of 80 servers and housed the entire Art.com website environment including web, application servers and databases. The system was taxed with massive file transfers from North Carolina to Columbus for high-resolution images. And, the majority of IT support staff resided in California, with limited local staff to support the East coast data center.

On the West coast, there were 75 servers housing the entire AllPosters.com website environment, back-end ERP/CRM and corporate data warehouse. Budget restrictions focused capital expenditures on production environments only. There existed no formal staging and development environment at either data center, which compromised the company’s ability to take advantage of many opportunities. The company’s high-availability requirements required the purchase of redundant systems that were often underutilized.

In the first quarter of 2006, with the help of Kovarus, Art.com successfully completed the migration of its new Columbus, Ohio data center to a VMware-focused data center featuring 8 ESX servers and 16 database servers, down from 80 servers. The 8 VMware servers have 28 virtualized servers and growing. On the West coast, the company began phasing a partial migration to VMware for select areas of its operating environment. Based on the success of this server consolidation and virtualization project, the company has postponed its need to move the West coast data center, which is a big cost savings in itself.

Cost savings/pay-off time benefits. “Although cost is a critical component of justifying a platform change this large, it would be too soon to attempt its true calculation. We will surpass our original assumptions by an order of magnitude when factoring in long-term support costs and opportunities not lost. More importantly, the benefit of creating a IT culture that focuses on efficiency, while improving our flexibility and time to respond is immeasurable,” said Mr. Lange. Since the migration five months ago, Art.com has experienced major improvements to its operations, including huge gains in production stability and easier management of its hardware environment. The company also experienced far more consolidation than originally expected.

Resource utilization. During the process of analyzing which servers could share a hardware platform, they were able to increase utilization of servers by streamlining and eradicating legacy applications and reducing the application to server ratio. The server consolidation ratio achieved was 8:1. As a result, Art.com has been able to expand its application suite with a smaller software licensing footprint and a smaller cage footprint.

Technical benefits. VMware has simplified and automated server provisioning, which provides great benefits in IT staffing. Given the virtual production “mirrors,” Art.com was able to move data center locations more efficiently, while having virtually no downtime. This has added a layer of security and high-availability to improve disaster recovery.

Customer credibility benefits. One of the biggest advantages of VMware is the ability to improve time to market on development; the ability to create extremely robust test, development and staging environments that will allow the company to add new features and experience fewer lost sales opportunities.

“VMware is allowing us to react much quicker to business requirements and bring new features to market much faster as aresult of our new development & staging environments. This one benefit will reap long-term rewards in the area of customer service and sales,” said Mr. Lange.

About Kovarus

Kovarus, Inc., is a premier technology consulting firm, specializing in data center design, implementation, and optimization. With its extensive industry expertise and proven methodologies, Kovarus helps companies align IT with strategic business goals and maximize their return on technology investments. Kovarus' unique ability to converge virtualization, storage, and networking technologies gives its clients a distinct operational advantage, enabling them to improve the efficiency, performance, and agility of service delivery. Headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company was founded in 2003 and has been chosen as a premier partner by leading technology companies including VMware, EMC, and Cisco. For more information on Kovarus, please visit www.kovarus.com or call 650-392-7848.

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