Successful server consolidation: it is all in the preparation

Successful server consolidation: it's all in the preparation
Business drivers
What is driving your request for server consolidation? The business drivers could be
financial, operational, or strategic.
Financial
One of the most common business drivers for server consolidation is growth in the
number of servers in the IT environment. Many IT departments are faced with server
growth upwards of 25% annually. Current economic conditions result in most IT
departments not having appropriate funding to support this kind of growth.
Maybe your IT department pays another company to maintain the IT infrastructure.
Coinciding with growth over the past few years, your server maintenance costs could be
very high. You might also be surpassing break point levels in your service agreements
and incurring additional PENALTY costs in order to support your server or storage needs.
The scaling back of corporate budgets is another factor to consider, as budgets are
reduced as a result of the stagnant economy. Even if your IT department has not yet
been affected, the prospect of finding ways to save money is always a challenge.
Operational
Your IT environment is affected by downtime and frustration at the end user level. The
need for a fault-resilient solution and the technology to make it work, are key focus
points for your business.
Through mergers and acquisitions, your IT department is now faced with integrating
multiple operating systems, and supporting a much greater number of end users. In
some instances, IT departments implement different applications on different platforms,
making the environment very complex and sometimes redundant.
Strategic
Today’s IT environment is much more competitive than in the past. Business units hold IT
departments accountable for services provided and expect a good value combined with
stable technology. Business units also explore the costs involved with outsourcing for
their IT needs, which makes it even more important that your IT department has the
scalability, reliability, and availability necessary to support business unit needs.
Server sprawl is an outcome of the past few years of building out the IT infrastructure,
not to mention the common practice of deploying a new server every time a new
application needs to be introduced. Servers can be physically spread out over many
locations, resulting in a complex environment that may be difficult to manage. Server
sprawl also leads to high costs of managing the IT infrastructure and low utilization
numbers due to the size and scope of the environment. Server sprawl could be
classified as a financial, technological, or strategic driver because there are elements of
each that would be addressed by server consolidation. It is a strategic decision to deal
with server sprawl sooner rather than later to reduce the complexity of your IT
infrastructure.
In today’s IT environment, businesses need to be agile and operate on a new barometer
of cost effectiveness. Simply put, it might be your responsibility to find a way to do more
with less and not compromise availability and functionality.
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