Case Study: The Heinz Endowments achieves enterprise-class, low-cost virtualization and improved resilience with Citrix XenServer

Philanthropic nonprofit achieves large-scale virtualization at low cost with Citrix XenServer

The Heinz Endowments, a Pittsburgh-based philanthropic nonprofit with just 35 staff, was running nearly 20 physical servers to support diverse grant programs, driving up power, cooling and maintenance costs. After an expensive VMware deployment and a weekend water leak that damaged equipment, the IT team needed a more flexible, resilient virtualization and disaster-recovery strategy without breaking the budget.

They migrated to Citrix XenServer and adopted XenDesktop, XenApp, NetScaler, ShareFile and GoToAssist to virtualize desktops, telephony and critical apps, and to simplify management. The result: enterprise-class features with far lower cost (avoiding a ~$60,000 VMware renewal and moving to maintenance at roughly $600 per socket), faster provisioning, unified administration, improved availability and disaster recovery, and a consistent, more productive user experience across devices.

The Heinz Endowments

Charlie Richardson

Director of Information Technology