When it comes to consumer electronics gear, audio and video enthusiasts rely on Crutchfield Corporation for excellent customer service and stellar product know-how. Crutchfield powers its information-based service with a wide range of tools for its website visitors, customers and internal customer advisors. To keep improving their stellar customer service, Crutchfield develops most of its line of business applications in-house – many leveraging SQL Server. In recent years, an expanding set of applications led to rampant data and server growth in its data center. 

To address this challenge, Crutchfield looked to EMC and Microsoft technologies. Already a user of Microsoft technologies, Crutchfield was able to virtualize 75% of its EMC storage infrastructure using Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V.  

Using EMC and Microsoft technologies, Crutchfield was able to:

  • Save a total of $500,000 through virtualization using Windows Server Hyper-V
  • Drive applications to market 20% faster
  • Decrease SQL Server disk read times and latency from 5 – 10 milliseconds to less than one millisecond
  • Improve storage utilization from 40 to 80 percent.

Watch Crutchfield Information Systems Manager of Enterprise Storage Craig VanHuss discuss how the company worked with EMC and Microsoft to transform its Microsoft applications, speeding performance and increasing efficiency, in this video.