Server Consolidation

Server consolidation promises great benefits, but can entail serious pitfalls as well. About 60% of IT shops are now consolidating, and nearly half of those projects will fail to meet their full expectations, according to Gartner. But with good planning, you can deliver exactly the results you expect, and more.

 

Because consolidation impacts your organisations on all levels, it’s critical to understand, plan, and communicate the overall flow as effectively as possible. In the spirit of that communication, let’s begin with a high-level view of where we’re going with this process. The basic steps are:

 

1. Identify your goals

 

Formulate the goals of your project. Consolidation has benefits far beyond cost; identify them and you’ll be in a better position to justify and direct your project.

 

2. Analyse the user requirements

 

User satisfaction is critical to the success of your project. Understand their unique needs to ensure they’re met in the consolidated environment.

 

3. Inventory the servers

 

Inventory your servers to assess which of the current configurations and attributes must be preserved in the consolidated environment.

 

4. Plan the consolidated environment

 

By definition, consolidation means going from many devices to fewer. Virtualisation vastly simplifies this transition. If you attempt to blend all users and applications to a onesize-fits-all storage pool, the result may be unmet expectations. A virtualisation layer provides the necessary flexibility to ensure that divergent user and server requirements can be individually accommodated.

 

5. Select the proper migration tool

 

Every consolidation project has unique requirements, and each of the data migration tools has its own strengths. Picking the right one will simplify your job.

 

6. Implementation

 

This is the easiest part when all of your background work is done. You’ve already overcome the roadblocks, and mitigated the technical risks. Now a careful, staged process will make the implementation flow.

 

Before

  • De-centralised management.
  • Significant workload.
  • Inconsistent practices.

 

After

  • Centralised administration.
  • Streamlined work flow.
  • Best practices management.

 

 

Conclusion

 

File server consolidation through virtualisation is fast becoming a critical initiative in large enterprise organisations around the world. With consolidation, you can improve resource utilisation, simplify infrastructure management and reduce capital and operating cost, all while increasing your organisation’s ROI (Return on Investment). Virtualisation technologies can help by allowing you to consolidate Windows and UNIX servers while preserving your end user’s access patterns and accessibility expectations. With a little careful planning, you’ll be ready for a smooth and eventless migration from real to a virtual world.