Successful server consolidation: it is all in the preparation

Successful server consolidation: it's all in the preparation
Abstract
The purpose of this white paper is to help IT professionals prepare for a successful IT
consolidation initiative, highlighting the needs for consolidating server environments.
The paper addresses the key areas of impact and the factors that need to be considered
before exploring consolidation options. The economics of consolidation are discussed,
including cost savings and cost avoidance that can be achieved through consolidation of
the IT environment.
Introduction
Today’s IT environment is unique. Budgets remain flat, business units now hold IT
departments accountable for services provided, and businesses demand less downtime
and increased productivity. In short, the expectation is to do more with less. This has
driven the need for IT consolidation as a way to streamline the IT infrastructure and to
help IT departments achieve this goal expectation.
IT departments are unable to implement a server consolidation effort without showing
economic justification first. While a server consolidation effort provides IT departments
many operational and strategic avantages, often the most important aspect of a
successful consolidation is the financial value. This paper highlights the technological
advantages of server consolidation and the potential positive financial impact on the IT
environment.
IT consolidation
defined
IT consolidation helps corporations build an adaptive IT infrastructure. The goal of IT
consolidation is to make optimal use of available computing resources, while
maintaining an infrastructure that is lower in costs, easier to manage, and secure. IT
consolidation introduces a number of benefits to the current IT infrastructure.
• Automated management tools give IT professionals the ability to deploy systems
faster and easily manage them remotely.
• Centralizing data centers and collocating equipment allow fewer staff members to
efficiently manage more servers.
• Storage can be consolidated economically so that each server and application has
access to a greater amount of storage.
• The ability to run more than one application on a single server or a set of clustered
servers and the ability to deploy servers that offer better performance in a smaller
form factor are now available.
• The dynamic allocation of resources and the ability of the IT infrastructure to respond
quickly to changing data-center demands with a point and click is a reality.
The IT journey
The process of IT consolidation can be looked at as a journey, with many different entry
points across multiple parts of an IT infrastructure. Where a business decides to enter
this journey depends on the integration of the current infrastructure and business
objectives. The journey can be looked at as a five part process described in the
following paragraphs.
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