Successful server consolidation: it is all in the preparation

Successful server consolidation: it's all in the preparation
Figure 7. ProLiant BL40P, a 4-way blade server
ideal for mission critical back-end applications
Figure 8. ProLiant DL560, a 2u 4-way enterprise
server
Maximizing
resources
The benefits of streamlining an IT infrastructure, along with other various financial,
operational, and strategic benefits, often assume the focus of a company’s server
consolidation initiative. However, there are technological benefits that need to be
considered. What very likely may be the key benefit of a successful server consolidation
is the power it gives an IT department for maximizing their compute resources. In the
past, when budgets were not a concern and the technology did not allow for better
utilization, there were no alternatives to an underutilized IT environment. Maximizing
compute resources allows for huge cost avoidance and reduction in operational
resources.
In most organizations, economic conditions and budget constraints do not support the
deployment of one or more new servers for every new application. These limitations
create a challenge for most IT professionals who have to determine how to use their
compute resources best while not compromising service levels and availability at the end
user level.
New technology featuring more powerful hardware and more efficient software driven
by a more reliable, capable, and scalable operating system, now gives IT departments a
way to improve their utilization numbers. Most IT department’s utilization numbers hover
in the 10 to 20% range. However, it is not uncommon to find IT departments with
utilization numbers in the high single digits. Regardless of where your utilization
numbers reside, there is a significant amount of untapped compute resources in your IT
environment.
Using the Windows 2000 operating system as the measuring scale, we know that the
break point for putting the IT environment in jeopardy would be 80% utilization. If 80%
utilization creates an unstable environment, there is no reason why an IT department
should not strive for 60% utilization. Even using the high end of the scale for average
environments, there is room for significant improvement in utilizing untapped resources.
Just increasing utilization to 40% would, in theory, cut the total server count in half.
A major concern for IT professionals when scaling their systems to address specific
needs is whether applications will work well together on the same server. Even though
running applications on the same server was not a “best practice” in the past, IT
professionals now want to know what it takes to make applications work well together
on the same server, similar to mainframe processing capabilities.
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