Decision criteria for server consolidation

As an Information Technology (IT) infrastructure evolves in an enterprise, many variables appear which make IT costs difficult to control. In today’s server environments, for example, you have to deal with multiple platforms, training, service level agreements (SLAs), server footprints, staff, capacity planning, and other important and complex issues.

In cases where cost control becomes a priority issue, server consolidation can help you reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). A server consolidation plan will optimize your computing capacity and manage your IT resources more efficiently, resulting in TCO reduction. Consolidation also offers benefits such as improvements in service levels, system management, and security, as well as reduced complexity.

Improved service levels

In the past few years, many innovative technologies have emerged for the UNIX world. If we analyze these announcements in detail, we see that many of the new features are designed to improve server availability, manageability, and performance.

Reduced complexity

The complexity of an infrastructure is a key factor that affects management and administration costs. A server consolidation project can simplify your infrastructure by reducing the number of servers and unifying operating system levels and storage units, thereby reducing administrative costs.

Improved system management

When the number of servers is reduced as part of a consolidation, most system management tasks will be easier to accomplish.The system administrator has fewer physical servers to handle, backup and restore operations are more effective, and the physical infrastructure for networking and storage is more efficient.

With a consolidated environment that includes clustering tools, system management is easier because the cluster can provide a single point of control for the participating cluster nodes, and tools to monitor and check the status of the cluster.