[June 13, 2011]

DAI Runs Production Servers in Virtustream xStream Enterprise Cloud to Contain Costs, Boost Business Continuity and Increase IT Capacity

Virtustream, Inc., a leading provider of cloud services and next-generation infrastructure solutions, today announced that DAI, an employee-owned global development company, has migrated its production servers to Virtustream's enterprise cloud platform, xStream. Built from the ground up to deliver a robust, secure cloud environment and support complex enterprise applications, xStream offers industry-leading service level agreements and a unique consumption-based pricing model, enabling companies to increase operational efficiency and ROI while maximizing their IT investments. DAI and Virtustream will be on site at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit, on June 13-15 in Orlando, Fla., to discuss the business case for cloud migrations and to outline best practices to ensure a successful transformation to the cloud.

Faced with significant business growth and customer demand, DAI looked to the cloud to contain costs, improve agility, enhance business continuity, and efficiently manage challenging power and cooling constraints. In partnership with Virtustream's Cloud Advisory Services team, DAI deployed the xStream Advisor, Virtustream's vendor agnostic cloud assessment tool, to analyze its current infrastructure, model an efficient cloud-based solution for DAI's specific requirements, and generate the migration framework to successfully transition DAI through the cloud adoption process. The Cloud Advisory Services team also helped DAI define the security and compliance requirements for a cloud-based architecture.

In addition to providing a predictive model of DAI's consumption once migrated, the xStream Advisor determined the power and environmental benefits of adopting the cloud. By calculating DAI's projected use of the cloud resources, the xStream Advisor demonstrated that DAI's reduced power consumption due to migrating to a cloud-based architecture would lower server-based carbon emissions by over 74 percent - including its guaranteed disaster recovery systems.

Today, more than 75 percent of DAI's production servers now run on the xStream platform with the migration of the additional servers scheduled for later this month. These servers spport mission critical services for over 500 users, including applications such as Lotus Domino, IBM (News - Alert) Sametime, SharePoint, and SQL server.

"At DAI we approach our transformation to the cloud with the same innovative thinking and analytic rigor that we bring to all development projects," said Larry Campbell, vice president, Information Management and Technology, DAI. "Migrating from our own internal data centers to Virtustream's xStream platform was a strategic business decision, one we knew would yield significant cost savings as a result of increasing IT capacity and reducing heating and cooling costs all while improving business continuity. We selected Virtustream as our partner as we were impressed by the company's professional expertise and advisory services in addition to the failover capability of its enterprise cloud."

DAI's migration to xStream marks an expansion of the company's relationship with Virtustream. In 2003, DAI turned to Virtustream and its Cloud Staging and Networks group to deploy a Disaster Recovery solution to a Virtustream data center. Virtustream owns and operates data centers in London, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, each featuring state-of-the-art security, power and connectivity to support mission critical business applications.

"Transitioning physical, on-premise servers and enterprise applications into a hosted data center and eventually to a private, multi-tenanted cloud like xStream requires much more than a transformation of infrastructure," said Sean Jennings, vice president, Solutions Architecture at Virtustream. "It requires a business transformation and a guarantee that both the data center and cloud platform can truly deliver enterprise class performance. As company executives and IT professionals come to understand the elasticity, security and performance that xStream has to offer, we've seen a significant increase in interest for our Cloud Advisory Services and more enterprise clients considering or planning cloud migrations."

At the Gartner (News - Alert) summit, Larry Campbell, vice president of Information Management and Technology for DAI and Sean Jennings, vice president, Solutions Architecture, Virtustream, will discuss DAI's cloud deployment in a presentation on Tuesday, June 14 at 4:45 p.m. entitled, "Getting Your IT Department On Board with the Cloud." Representatives from Virtustream, a silver-plus sponsor of the summit, will be providing an overview of the company's Cloud Advisory Services and demonstrating xStream in its booth CC. As a continuation of Virtustream's Rockin' the Cloud Tour 2011, attendees are invited to visit the booth to get a vintage rock-inspired cloud t-shirt and to enter for a chance to win a new electric guitar.

About DAI

Founded in 1970, DAI is an independent, employee-owned, mission-driven development firm. DAI has worked in 160 developing and transition countries, providing development solutions in crisis mitigation and stability operations, private sector development and financial services, agriculture and agribusiness, democratic governance and public sector management, economics and trade, water and natural resources management, HIV/AIDS and zoonotic disease control, and energy and climate change.

About Virtustream

Virtustream (www.virtustream.com) is an innovative cloud provisioning firm committed to delivering next generation infrastructure services to enterprise class customers. We leverage our secure high performance platform, xStream, to deliver highly available and elastic compute resources at true consumption-based pricing. We lead our Cloud Platform Services with Cloud Advisory Services, providing expertise in the areas of cloud adoption, migration and architecture strategies and infrastructure-related integration services. We provide ongoing support for our Cloud Platform Services through two groups: our Cloud Cover team provides a managed service, from core infrastructure through enterprise applications and the Cloud Staging and Networks group that provides colocation, security and network services. Virtustream owns and operates its own data centers in the U.S. and U.K., and has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, London, Dublin and the Channel Islands. Keep tabs on us with Twitter: www.twitter.com/Virtustream360.

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