Maintain Fewer Servers
Overview
On This Page
Challenge
In a challenging economy, a primary concern of business and Information Technology (IT) leaders is to reduce operating costs and simplify management of their IT infrastructure. Due to recent innovations with servers and server software companies can now greatly decrease IT costs by consolidating their servers. Servers are now less expensive and no longer require dedicated environments, such as raised floors or separate buildings, to deploy. Yet server proliferation remains a major cause of an overly complex and costly IT infrastructure and can result in an increased total cost of ownership (TCO), due to high administration and management costs-sometimes amounting up to 80 percent of an IT budget.
Server proliferation can result from:
| • | Lack of datacenter processes: The application of desktop management principles and procedures on distributed server systems has led to the poor control over how, when, and where servers are deployed and managed.
|
| • | Scalability limitations: Some server hardware has suffered from scalability issues as well as by limitations imposed by direct—attach storage-where capacity was limited, and could not be pooled across servers.
|
| • | Application design: Application developers typically built applications with the assumption that a server could only handle one application at a time which led a new server deployment for every new application.
|
Solution
Server consolidation is an ongoing process that incorporates servers, storage, applications, and services, and ties all of them together with management best practices. Consolidation aligns IT resources to business goals, ensuring that the needs of the business are meet through the definition of standard platforms, appropriately sized resources, and operation management processes and tools. Microsoft and its partners support the drive to operational efficiency through server consolidation by helping IT organizations plan for consolidation from beginning to end.
The Microsoft solution for server consolidation includes:
Technologies | | • | Reduce the complexity and inefficiency of a networking environment.
| | • | Consolidate file and print servers, messaging infrastructure, database servers, domain controllers, Web applications, and Applications Servers.
| | • | Achieve mission-critical system reliability, availability, supportability, and manageability of your IT Infrastructure.
| | • | Optimize your IT processes and procedures.
|
|
Partners | | • | Assessment services
| | • | Prescriptive guidance
| | • | Consolidation solutions
|
|
Consulting Services | | • | Evaluate your server infrastructure
| | • | Plan your server consolidation
| | • | Reduce your TCO
|
|
Best Practices | | • | Proven technical guidance
| | • | Planning assistance
| | • | Successful project implementation
|
|
To learn more about Microsoft's nine-step consolidation process, click here.
Benefits
Microsoft Server Consolidation solutions allow you to:
| • | Get more value out of your IT investment.
|
| • | Optimize your current environment, resulting in higher resource utilization, higher agility, and availability of the IT infrastructure.
|
| • | Ensure server growth happens in a controlled and economical manner.
|
A recently published Meta Group study offers some real world examples illustrating the benefits of consolidation:
| • | Prior to its merger with HP, Compaq went from 82 to 19 servers, reducing its Server operating costs $1.4 million annually.
|
| • | By upgrading their IT infrastructure Enterasys Networks consolidated their servers by 30 percent, reduced systems management costs by 20 percent, and reallocated 35 percent of their IT support staff.
|
| • | Robert Half International consolidated 200 remote servers to 41 centrally-managed servers, reducing maintenance by $500,000 per year.
|
Visit the Maintain Fewer Servers Case Studies page for more real world consolidation examples.
