PGA Tour store rejects the Tiger Woods of server virtualization

For PGA Tour SuperStore, the performance and cost savings Virtual Iron offered were enough to turn it away from VMware.

PGA Tour SuperStore has eight locations, each a huge golf retail outlet that sells not only apparel and equipment, but also features interactive areas such as driving ranges and putting greens. The business, owned by Golf and Tennis Pro Shop, in Atlanta, is growing fast and so it looked to HP blades and virtualization as a way to create an infrastructure capable of meeting quick-expanding business demands.

Gentry Ganote, CIO of Golf and Tennis Pro Shop, says his team looked at a variety of virtualization options from VMware to Microsoft to Virtual Iron. The company settled on Virtual Iron because of performance and price, he says.

“We chose Virtual Iron because of their hypervisor technology – from a performance standpoint my [operating system] is going to be near 100% performance, we may look at 5% to 7% performance degradation. And the pricing was very exciting for the feature set that they offered,” he says.

While PGA Tour SuperStore uses Fibre Channel today to connect its Virtual Iron virtual servers to its storage-area network, it is looking at cutting costs by taking advantage of Virtual Iron’s support for iSCSI in future deployments.

“The value for us is being able to deploy less expensive servers into our SAN environment. Servers will be able to run iSCSI so we won’t have to buy [Host Bus Adapters] and [iSCSI] is real easy to deploy,” Ganote says.