Server Consolidation

Most organisations with large server estates share some common issues:

• Power capacity shortage
• Increasing electricity bills
• Lack of physical space in which to house new servers
• Lack of air conditioning capacity
• Shortage of network switches
• Shortage of storage switches
• Prohibitively prolonged timescales to provision new server

By leveraging server virtualisation technologies, we can eliminate these issues by virtualising multiple physical servers and consolidating them onto a single highly specified server. With today's hardware, the average physical server operates at around 7% utilisation. By consolidating these servers onto one suitably specified server, we can achieve on average a 15:1 consolidation ratio. This translates into substantial saving in terms of the amount of hardware to maintain and buy, vastly reduced power requirements, reduction in the amount of network switches required, reduction in the numbers of FC ports required to access enterprise storage, reduced air conditioning requirements and vastly reduced rack space required to house these servers.

Other, soft benefits include centralised administration of the entire enterprise through a central console, the ability to provision new virtual machines, fully built and configured into production in under 10 minutes, 99.9% server and application uptime, automatic high availability and resilience for any workload and guaranteed patching levels to name a few.