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An organization’s success and ability to react to market and environmental changes are now more dependent than ever on an effective and efficient IT infrastructure. Yet IT departments have become increasingly complex and costly, making it more difficult and time-consuming to support changing business requirements. In addition, this complexity continues to increase the cost of doing business by making the management and maintenance of these IT environments more expensive. In order to become more efficient and improve their competitive stance, organizations need to find ways to simplify their IT environments — without disrupting their business operations.
Organizations often embrace server consolidation as an ideal path to streamlining the IT environment. Unfortunately, many look at it only as a way to reduce the number of servers and therefore fail to realize all the benefits of such an initiative. IBM is taking a more strategic approach to server consolidation. Viewing it within the context of resource optimization, IBM believes server consolidation can not only address an organization’s IT infrastructure but also help to align IT objectives and processes with the organization’s business needs. Server consolidation can provide the first step toward designing and implementing a more rational, efficient and flexible IT environment that truly supports an organization’s overall strategic business objectives. But taking this first step involves more than just eliminating a few servers here and there — it requires a thoughtful approach, one that takes into consideration both business and IT objectives and constraints.
This white paper provides a starting point for organizations contemplating server consolidation. It includes an overview of server consolidation concepts and techniques and provides guidance on methodologies. It also looks at the potential cost savings associated with server consolidation and offers information on how organizations can sustain the advantage they have gained by consolidating their servers.
Server consolidation techniques
There are several ways to approach a server consolidation project. The following are a few of the more commonly used techniques.
Centralization
Centralization involves consolidating multiple servers within fewer sites. Examples might include moving 20 servers dispersed throughout three floors of a building to a single server room, or moving 200 servers originally installed in 20 locations to three. Centralization is often the first step an organization takes when it wishes to use server consolidation to control costs. It also is generally an organization’s initial step toward rationalizing the architecture after a realignment of responsibilities.
The primary benefits of centralization are:
Lower data center costs associated with elements such as power and floor space
An easier-to-manage IT environment due to more consistent standards, improved tools and specialization
Increased availability and recoverability
Improved disaster-recovery capabilities
Reduced security risk as a result of having fewer locations to protect.
Physical consolidation
Physical consolidation is often what comes to mind for most people when they think of server consolidation. It is the process of reducing the actual number of servers by replacing many servers with fewer, more powerful servers or clustered systems. This can take place within the same architecture or across architectural boundaries. For example, an organization may replace several two-way UNIX® servers with one 16-way UNIX server or consolidate hundreds of Intel®-processor-based servers onto a mainframe server running the Linux® operating system (OS).
The primary benefits of physical consolidation are:
Optimized utilization of the remaining servers
Improved application throughput and performance
Improved manageability
Greater scalability
Reduced floor space
Lower maintenance, hardware, support and software licensing costs.
Application integration
Breaking the one application/one server paradigm, application integration is sometimes referred to as the nirvana of server consolidation techniques. This approach involves consolidating multiple applications into fewer servers and OS instances, resulting in not only reduced complexity but also business process integration and automation. It enables the colocation of mixed workloads within a unified infrastructure so that applications can communicate and work together seamlessly.
The primary potential benefits of application integration are:
Optimized performance and resource utilization
Substantial cost savings, including reduced administrative costs
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