Maintain Fewer Servers

Determine the capacity and usage of servers.

Document the support and management processes.

Take inventory of your server infrastructure.

Determine the cost of managing and maintaining your infrastructure.

Determine your top business and technology priorities for the project.

Make trade-offs among priorities, including high availability, cost reduction, and infrastructure flexibility.

Identify the required capacity goals of the new environment.

Determine the cost goals for managing and maintaining consolidated infrastructure.

Plot the schedule and budget for the consolidation project.

Research your hardware and software options.

Select an infrastructure based on your capacity and growth requirements.

Design for failover and redundancy.

Assess the business impact of each of the consolidation alternatives.

Identify the organizational roles and responsibilities during and after the consolidation.

Fully assess plan, risks, budget, and desired results prior to implementing.

Identify the needed hardware and software.

Know your specific network and infrastructure design.

Acknowledge any technical limitations and risks.

Build and test your consolidated environment.

Write procedures for moving users and data to the new environment.

Build a detailed deployment schedule, including contingency plans.

Set the criteria for proceeding.

Deploy applications, utilities, and tools in the new, consolidated production environment.

Develop and document post-consolidation maintenance and management procedures.

Ensure that appropriate backups and contingency plans are in place prior to migration.

Complete migration according to detailed schedule.

Test consolidated environment, including users and data.

Transition to the new production environment.

Evaluate the results of your consolidation project, including costs and maintenance procedures.

Re-evaluate the consolidation on a regular basis.

Optimize your environment.