XenSource, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise-class virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen® hypervisor, today announced that the Shires of Dardanup, Harvey, and Donnybrook/Balingup, government councils located in Western Australia, have adopted XenSource in their data centers for consolidation of Linux and Windows terminal servers and business continuity. Since deploying XenEnterprise, the Shires have cut server spending, reduced management time, and increased performance.

"We are only two months into deployment and there have already been a number of benefits to using XenEnterprise," said Stephen Eaton, Information Technology Officer of the Shires of Dardanup, Harvey, and Donnybrook/Balingup. "I was at the point where I was going to have to buy more servers as our infrastructure was growing and the services I needed to provide to the staff of the councils were growing. Virtualizing our data centers with XenEnterprise has allowed us to do what we want."

Eaton and the Shires had looked at VMware but chose XenSource because of its exceptional price point, and features, including support of both Linux and Windows operating systems. Since deployment, the Shires have experienced a significant reduction in time spent managing servers, substantial savings on the cost of new servers, and reduced server down time due to less stress placed on power resources and the ability to back up to allocate services to a newly provisioned machine within minutes. Recently, Eaton has been able to reinforce the Shires' business continuity and disaster recovery infrastructure with XenEnterprise v4 features like live migration with XenMotion and live disk image snapshotting.

"Our customers choose XenSource solutions for a variety of reasons," said John Glendenning, VP of international sales for XenSource. "Performance, ease of use, and functionality are just a few of the benefits customers tell us about, but we also see our value with customers like the Shires coming from our ability to provide a low barrier to entry for users, grow with their needs through easy product upgrades and offer a strong product roadmap."