Successful server consolidation: it is all in the preparation

Successful server consolidation: it's all in the preparation
Common
customer
scenarios
In order to be more relevant to your everyday business needs, it is essential to examine
some common customer scenarios to see how the discussed topics play a role in IT
consolidation. In this section, we will explore some of the consolidation needs and
potential benefits for customers that initiated a server consolidation effort with the help of
HP.
Providing in-house IT
services
In today’s ultra-competitive IT marketplace, many corporate in-house IT providers are
challenged with positioning themselves as the primary IT provider to business units. In-
house IT providers are striving to lower long-term TCO, while providing cost-effective,
high-value alternatives to external IT vendors. This drives the need for a solid, scalable,
highly available foundation capable of supporting the demands of various business units.
In situations like this, it is common for IT environments to have experienced explosive
growth and dramatic change over the course of a few years. This evolution is usually
marked by growth in business and mission-critical applications, increased server and
storage needs, diminishing data center space, and the expansion of engineering and
support resources. Taking all of these factors into consideration, in-house IT providers
usually try to find a way to leverage existing and future hardware and platform
technology in order to lower long-term TCO and become strategically positioned as the
primary IT provider.
HP’s vision for this type of situation is to help in-house IT providers create an adaptive
infrastructure. Starting with the upgrade to Windows 2000, then building on the
platform using blade servers to reduce space without compromising processing power,
high-end 8-way servers for mission critical applications, and ProLiant software for remote
management and dynamic resource allocation. The end result is a fault-resilient IT
environment that allows in-house IT providers to accurately predict, prevent, diagnose,
and rapidly respond to potential and actual fault conditions. The consolidated
infrastructure will benefit from better resource utilization and improved management, all
while reducing TCO and avoiding costs, making a server consolidation initiative a
valuable investment.
Outsourcing costs
Many companies pay an external IT provider to support a specific number of servers in
order to maintain their IT environment. The downside of this strategy is that once a
specific breakpoint is bypassed, additional costs are incurred. This presents a challenge
because as business grows, so do the needs of an IT environment. Due to budget
constraints, many companies must find a way to realize immediate cost savings without
losing productivity. This drives the need for a scalable IT infrastructure.
Historically, companies that outsource their IT infrastructure deployed a single server
dedicated to a specific application. This practice translated into an increasingly high
cost for support and management of these servers. This also translates into a complex
support environment for the appropriate service levels required.
Typically, companies in this situation choose to run a pilot program, called a proof of
concept, before initiating consolidation across the entire IT infrastructure. This pilot
program usually focuses on consolidating applications from a one application-to-one
server platform to a multiple applications-to-one server environment. The most important
aspect of this proof of concept is to learn how to reduce the number of servers by
partitioning compute resources. Hardware, such as the DL580G2 4-way server and the
DL760 8-way server, using the ProLiant Essentials Workload Management Pack software
to partition compute resources often dramatically reduce the number of servers needed to
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