Mid-Tiers: The Case For Consolidation

If you're a midrange company sporting anywhere from a couple hundred to 1,000 employees, odds are that you've built up quite a server presence over the years. And you've accumulated all the ancillary costs that come with that, too--the commitment of countless IT hours to configuration and maintenance, the cooling costs, the downtime if a key server goes down and the failover doesn't kick in, and more.

Might you be better off consolidating your servers into a lesser number of more powerful boxes that can handle multiple operating systems and their associated applications as well? Many server manufacturers are eager to convince you that the answer is "Yes," and now there's a fair amount of evidence to support the notion. Savings on hardware expenditures, electricity and cooling costs, and staff time are all components of a decision that more midrange companies are making to run operations on less server boxes.

"We're able with our Open POWER servers, for example, to offer benefits with consolidation that give our customers far more flexibility," said Kevin Dawson, senior marketing manager for IBM's Linux On POWER operation. "SMB customers have been able to cut costs and do different things than they could with a distributed setup, and they don't lose scalability if their needs change again."

The trend is strong: Worldwide customer revenue for server consolidation is expected to grow from $5.2 billion in 2003 to $8.5 billion by the coming year, according to industry research firm IDC, and a spring 2005 report by Gartner found that 60 percent of surveyed IT managers had a server consolidation project under way or planned.There's little doubt that a successfully executed system consolidation can make a server administrator's life much easier. Among the advantages of consolidated systems are:

One company that says it benefited from server consolidation is European mortgage issuer Credit Immobilier de France, which was able to boil down a heterogeneous system of Hewlett-Packard and IBM servers handling its operations across 17 branches onto one IBM eServer iSeries 570 system working in tandem with a single IBM TotalStorage DS8000 system.

"We were very happy with our upgrade and consolidation," said Marc Bergougnoux, managing director of GIE i-CIF, Credit Immobilier's IT organization. "We were able to put all of our applications together, run our legacy applications {that were written] for OS400, and achieve optimization of our entire IT organization into one working group."

Virtualization has particularly kicked off a new generation of server consolidation in the enterprise. "We get an exponential cost saving because of the way VMware pools server resources to optimize hardware utilization," said Matt Ramseyer, a senior business analyst for 7-Eleven, which is able to run a variety of Windows flavors and Red Hat Linux on servers running under VMware's ESX and GSX Server packages.Is is a potential problem to keep all of your mission-critical data eggs in one server basket? There's no question that relying on fewer machines means that CIOs and system administrators have to ensure that their servers can meet their business's needs to be up at all times. But the market has also responded with an emphasis on high-availability servers. “Mission-critical Linux is only possible when the underlying hardware platform is unrelentingly reliable, and that’s a quality the marketplace has been demanding,” said Greg Enriquez, senior vice president for worldwide field operations at Stratus, which is targeting potential consolidation customers with its new ftServer T60.

Of course, there are plenty of ways around the failure issue; offsite backup is always a necessary idea for any company with 24/7 operations, and for midrange companies with branches, backing up onto another server on your own network is a fail-safe way of ensuring that data isn't lost and business isn't subjected to downtime. Credit Immobilier's Bergougnoux says that the newest generations of servers that the company evaluated all met its needs for reliability. "High availability of the system was one of our major priorities," he says. "

The ease of the system cutover was another appealing aspect of consolidation, Bergougnoux said. "We met our transition of the system in the nine months we'd planned for it, without any major problems," he said. "And we never stopped our operations."Ensuring that a customer's experience with a consolidation project goes well is a primary goal for server providers, said Nicolas Sekakki, vice president of IBM's Western Europe systems and technology group, who worked with Credit Immobilier on its server move. "You have to provide a clear roadmap that shows them their return on investment and the ease of migrating, consolidating and running their systems," he says. "But when you do, the value proposition becomes pretty obvious."