The Microsoft Information Technology Group (MSIT) was experiencing a rapid increase in the time and cost required to maintain its data centers. The storage volume was doubling each year and disk utilization was low. In the first quarter of 2004, MSIT worked with EMC to deploy a storage service built on Windows Server® 2003, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005, and the EMC CLARiiON storage area network. With this storage utility, MSIT has reduced administrative and storage costs while providing its customers with faster and more reliable service. MSIT has cut storage costs by 50 percent and increased disk utilization to 70 percent. It has also increased data availability to 99.999 percent and reduced the time needed to grant storage space to a customer from 12 days to one day. MSIT expects to see more improvements in performance and cost after moving its servers to Windows Server 2008.  Full Case Study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000001968