The Barkley ad firm implements consolidation, virtualization and replication to strengthen business-continuity and disaster-recovery planning. The philosophy at the Kansas City-based ad agency is that every idea has an expiration date. And what worked yesterday may not work today.

"We're at the point now that if our primary file server (where the majority of our files are stored) were to go down for a day, it would have a huge business impact," says Larry Penrod, network manager at Barkley. With the goal of getting to 100 percent availability, Penrod developed a plan that began with creating virtual copies of nearly all of the servers using HP's blade hardware, VMware's virtualization software and a variety of existing storage platforms. Moving to HP blades has allowed the firm to drastically reduce its server footprint in the data center.