Can consolidating your data center yield long-term savings sufficient enough to warrant the project? There is no doubt. By right-sizing your data center, you can often recoup the project costs in months, not years.
bmc iNDUSTRY INSIGHTs
Five Steps to Successful
Data Center Consolidation
By Vick Vaishnavi, vice president of Worldwide Marketing for BMC Software
When you move from one home to another, particularly if you're going from a larger place to a smaller one, you need to identify what you have, what to keep, and what to store. Chances are that you'll find a lot excess items you don't really need. As part of this process, for example, you may realize that it's not necessary to buy a new hammer whenever you need one just because you couldn't find the five other hammers in your garage. This "discovery" and consolidation process is similar to what happens when IT organizations look at consolidating their data centers.
The floor space occupied and the rising cost of heating and cooling vast expanses of server racks represent a significant amount of your IT budget. Can downsizing and consolidating data centers yield long-term savings sufficient enough to warrant the project? There is no doubt. By right-sizing, you can often recoup the project costs in months, not years. Through careful planning and a commitment to continued maintenance, data center consolidation provides the ability to achieve attainable, sustainable savings during a time when such opportunities are both necessary and rare.
Defining Data Center Consolidation includes not just servers, networks, equipment, and The term "data center consolidation" can mean the real estate that houses them, but applications, different things to different people, from simply software licenses, management tools, and even reducing the number of physical servers in an people and vendors. isolated location to reducing the global footprint One goal of a data center consolidation project might of a company's entire infrastructure (including be to reduce power consumption costs by enabling applications and software licenses, etc.). For the you to consolidate servers and then monitoring, purposes of this article, think of consolidation as measuring, and reporting on power consumption. the act of reducing all entities associated with your Real-time monitoring can provide an early warning IT infrastructure to a manageable set, helping you of out-of-limits power conditions and historical power control costs without sacrificing your service level consumption information. This information can be used expectations and your service availability. This to assist with server consolidation and virtualization bmc iNDUSTRY INSIGHTs
5 Things to Include in planning, capacity planning, change planning, and value of the consolidation to show that your efforts Your Business Case for continuous improvement. are meeting your goals. Consolidation»» Use a discovery tool to get true Reasons for Data Center Consolidation Part of consolidation takes into consideration the visibility into your environment, variety of skills required to maintain the infrastruc-its physical components and There are many reasons that companies engage in operational dependencies. consolidation projects, most of which are directly ture. Therefore, an important aspect of consolidation driven by a common desired outcome: cost reduction. relates to standardization. While consolidation »» Consider the physical plant costs - you'll use less space, power, and For example, let's look at mergers and acquisitions. typically refers to a reduction in systems, standard-cooling after consolidation. If your company acquired another company, you ization means that you've simplified the infrastructure, »would probably want to eliminate duplicate coverage as an example, by moving all of your NCR and » Use capacity management solutions to help you identify by reducing the number of entities that serve the HP UNIX systems to SUN. Or, for your Windows hardware that you can virtualize same purpose. By looking for multiple software environment, it means that you moved from HP, or make more efficient. licenses of the same application across your company IBM, and Dell over to Dell as a single hardware »» Show metrics for the operational and the acquired one, you might be able to reduce platform. As a result, maintaining the infrastructure efficiencies you'll gain by auto the licenses to just one. Or, if the acquired company requires fewer skill sets. Standardization, therefore, mating manual processes, has its own service desk system, then standard- positively impacts ... [download for more]
