Server Consolidation

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Most of our resources either lie redundant or are wasted due to their non-judicious distribution. This is because the capacity assigned to each remains unused most of the times as the peak loads do not stay continuously. Even during the times when the workload is maximum, all the resources are seldom occupied. The systems and processes are designed in a manner such that they do not overshoot the maximum capacity. Same happens in our server rooms and data centers. Organizations end up with servers of different configurations, some of them completely out of date, running a variety of OSs and applications for different departments. Since these are individual servers, resources such as CPU power, disk space and RAM built into each remain redundant to an appreciable extent. Just imagine, these unused resources if added up could come to something that would be sufficient to run another such set of processes. But, just because they are on discrete systems, these are not useable by other systems than those allocated.

To add to our woes, 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.

Unleash the power of server consolidation. In simple terms, combine a few servers and be able to work on any OS or application you like. But what lies in the world of consolidated servers for any organization? And why should one take the pain to consolidate at all? After all, it costs money. While a server consolidation effort provides IT departments many operational and strategic advantages, often the most important aspect of a successful consolidation is the financial value.
Talking of the costs involved, Mahindra & Mahindra-an organization that has very recently upgraded to consolidated servers on a SAP R/3 platform (refer to the case study)-puts it very elegantly as, “ The cost of no change is more than the cost of change.”

So what is server consolidation? At its core, server consolidation is an enabling technology encompassing not just hardware, but software, services and-most importantly-the systems management disciplines and 'best practices' to tie it all together. 
The goal is to optimize and simplify your existing IT infrastructure-not just the servers, but the entire end-to-end infrastructure. The objective being to provide a stable foundation for new solution deployment: e-business, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management and business intelligence.

Server consoliation is not only the physical movement of distributed architecture to centralized one, but also comprises collocation, hardware/data layer integration, application integration and Web host layer consolidation. Let's briefly look at what each of these signify. 

Collocation: An important part of a server consolidation, the benefits of hardware relocation include immediate cost savings on server management and operation. You also get better physical security, availability and system-usage capabilities.

Hardware/data layer integration: This means reducing the count of servers and enabling centralizing storage. It also lowers operating costs while improving performance and maximizing the availability of applications and data.

Application integration: This means shifting the IT environment from multiple applications accessing multiple databases to solutions running on fewer servers that integrate databases and applications. This improves performance while reducing the TCO (total cost of ownership).

Web layer hosting: Consolidates the applications that run on a Web server onto a smaller number of servers to regain the data center space and reduce the expenditures. You can do this by clustering, using virtual machines, etc.

Ways of server consolidation
Server consolidation is an important part of IT consolidation. Today's servers consistently deliver increased reliability and processing power. The technological capabilities of servers present new options for IT managers. Large servers with multiple processors for mission-critical applications and smaller servers designed to utilize space more efficiently can help IT managers streamline their infrastructure.

A successful server consolidation initiative will result in tangible financial, operational and strategic benefits while making the IT environment more efficient and easier to manage. This can be done in the following ways:

• Centralization: You can collocate the servers and/or storage into fewer locations or one central location 
• Physical: This means consolidating servers or storage systems with the same application types or platforms onto fewer or larger systems with the same application type or platform 
• Data integration: Here you combine data with different formats onto a similar format or platform 
• Application: This would consolidate and define the way the servers or storage systems would support different types of workloads onto fewer or larger systems. Here you are allowed to manage applications.
• Storage: This means unifying storage onto fewer or larger storage systems independent of the server type, OS or 
  application

Application consolidation is the hottest topic of discussion among IT professionals. You can consolidate your applications by using either heterogeneous consolidation or homogeneous consolidation. While heterogeneous application consolidation combines several different application types on the same server, the latter combines several instances of the same application on a single server. 

Both these approaches of application consolidation can reduce the number of servers required to run applications and maintain the IT infrastructure. So one should use them according to the enterprise-specific needs.

Why consolidate?
There are different drivers that influence an organization's business decisions of whether or not to consolidate your servers. And accordingly the strategies are defined and the extent of consolidation within an IT environment is decided. The driving forces behind a decision to consolidate could either be financial, operational or strategic. In most organizations, you have increasing number of servers as they grow. But not all of them have the financial strength to buy, implement, support and maintain these servers. So you may want to consolidate.

Otherwise, on the operations front, your organization may be facing higher downtimes and end-user frustration due to 
peaking server capacities or overloading. So the need to upgrade to an integrated environment where you can allocate resources properly and manage them efficiently as well. 

On the other hand, there are some visionaries who would want a better and stable IT environment and processes in place. They know that with server consolidation in place, they would avail better functionality and availability. That is, one objective might be to obtain, say, 99.99% uptimes. Not only would you reduce the costs associated with managing your IT infrastructure, but you would also benefit from having a less complex infrastructure and increased agility. 

From the customers point of view, they would be looking to reduce the number of servers, data center space, TCO or the total cost of operation, operating costs, while simplifying the IT environment. While a server consolidation initiative might 
reduce the number of servers in your environment, it is also likely that the scalability of the server environment will be greatly 
increased allowing you to put resources to use exactly when and where needed.

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Server Consolidation at NSE

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