Perimeter Church Simplifies IT Administration with VMware

Perimeter Church (Perimeter) has been serving the greater Atlanta, Georgia, area for nearly 30 years through its various churches and missions, which are spread throughout the Atlanta area. Perimeter has a weekly attendance of 7,000 persons.
Perimeter heavily utilizes its intranet for internal communications and to access key resources needed to serve its congregation. As the Perimeter congregation expanded, Perimeter’s IT staff needed to find a way to meet the growing IT needs of the church with limited staff. “We saw the tremendous administrative benefits that VMware Infrastructure 3 could provide, and we were sold,” says John Dolan, IT specialist at Perimeter Church.
From provisioning new servers to performing server maintenance, the Perimeter IT team has been able to perform its administrative functions much more effectively with VMware technology. “The time we save on IT administration can be dedicated towards enhancing the Perimeter intranet and developing new functionality to better connect our staff and volunteers with our congregation,” says Dolan. “That helps us better serve both our members and our community.”

Results
- Reduced server repair time by 80 percent. “Previously, the act of rebuilding a Citrix would take nearly five hours,” says Dolan. “Now, we can utilize a base image to rebuild a Citrix server in less than an hour.”
- Shortened server provisioning time. “It used to take as long as two weeks to provision a brand new server,” says Dolan. “With VMware software, we can accomplish the same task in 30 minutes.”
- Avoided nearly $80,000 of hardware costs. “VMware software allows us to have 23 virtual servers machines running on three boxes,” says Dolan. “That’s saved us from having to buy as many as 20 additional servers—a real savings for our organization.”