With business booming in Asia, Eli Lilly needed to implement Unicode, but required more data storage to handle the switch from ASCII to Unicode. At the same time, the company also decided to dump legacy RISC platforms, and virtualize where possible.

Moving Eli Lilly's operations wasn't trivial – the company needed to support 50,000 SAP users, maintain or improve its performance, and ensure that the move happen with no downtime.

How'd they do it? By moving to HP ProLiant servers with Intel Xeon 7500 and 5600 series processors, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM DB2 and VMware vSphere 4.0.

The result? Performance is up as much as 40 percent for some applications, and 11 percent overall – all while eliminating 35 racks of servers and reducing power and cooling consumption by 80 percent.

The demanding throughput requirements of large databases and transactional applications requires better virtual machine performance than previous generations.

Intel and VMware are delivering an enterprise virtualization platform that can handle the most extreme workloads. With Intel Intel Xeon processor and VMWare vSphere, most critical mission-critical applications can be scaled with consolidation goals met across the data center.