Microsoft and Target have announced that the latter is running business-critical workloads for all its retail stores on 15,000 virtual machines using Microsoft virtualization and management technologies.
The second-largest discount retailer in the US, Target has virtualized inventory, point-of-sale, supply-chain management, asset protection, in-store digital media and more on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center.
Earlier this year, Target scaled its deployment of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to every US store in its chain.
Applications, ranging from Microsoft SQL Server 2008 SP1, SharePoint 2007 and Exchange 2007 to third-party, line-of-business software, can now be deployed and managed more quickly, with 8,650 fewer physical servers to maintain, power and refresh.
The retail giant has also implemented the Microsoft System Center management platform to manage and patch more than 300,000 endpoints, ranging from servers and PCs to mobile inventory devices and point-of-sale registers.