IBM Cools the Data Center at W3i and Freeze.com With Bladed Infrastructure

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that W3i, a downloadable content solutions company that runs Freeze.com, has streamlined and simplified its entire IT infrastructure and eliminated the expense of additional power and cooling equipment for its data center by migrating to IBM BladeCenter servers.

Launched in 2001, the Minnesota-based company offers screensavers and graphics through its websites, Freeze.com, ScreenSaver.com, Wallpapers.com and Ringtone.com, as well as thousands of sites throughout the Internet. It prides itself in delivering a high-quality on-line experience to nearly 85 million users. To improve its service to its customers, W3i wanted to build a more efficient computing infrastructure that could handle spikes in demand without adding more servers or sacrificing IT staff time.

The company turned to IBM, the industry's leading blade vendor, to help overhaul its infrastructure by deploying 85 Intel Xeon-based IBM BladeCenter servers, replacing all Dell servers deployed within the environment. With a diskless blade solution, money is saved on power and cooling by removing the only moving part on the blade. W3i's blade solution does not have any local hard drives, meaning much less power is consumed to get their work done. The company is also able to fully leverage their current storage infrastructure for the blades to support SQL and collaboration services.

"With Dell, we had boxes upon boxes of memory and a stockpiled mess of equipment. I used to get pages in the middle of the night just to replace a cooling fan," said Kyle Ohme, Director of IT for W3i. "We needed an efficient solution that would provide a responsive and reliable infrastructure that could quickly adapt to demand and traffic shifts without requiring more space, servers and staff. We found what we needed with IBM BladeCenter."

W3i's IT operations have changed dramatically as the time to provision its servers came down from "five hours to just five minutes." The company can now meet frequent spikes in server utilization demand. In addition, the IT staff has increased its productivity tremendously with four times the management capacity it had before the new solution allowing the growing company to spend time on solving business issues rather than hardware issues.

For more information about IBM BladeCenter, please visit: www.ibm.com/bladecenter

About W3i

W3i delivers proven downloadable content solutions. With over 15 million unique users each month, W3i provides a receptive consumer base for customized, targeted marketing programs including software marketing, lead generation, display advertising, product placement and paid subscriptions. W3i is a recent winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2006 Award in the Minnesota and Dakotas region.

W3i, owner of Freeze.com, Ringtone.com, ScreenSaver.com and Wallpapers.com, was established in January 2007 to unite all its business entities including Freeze.com, which was founded in 2000. Today it employs more than 50 Internet professionals. To learn more about W3i, visit www.w3i.com