As organizations and their computing needs grow, they tend to accumulate servers, which get distributed across offices and departments. Over time, any organization can end up with servers of different configurations, some of them completely out of date, running a variety of OSs and applications. Since each server is individually purchased, there would be redundancies like extra CPU power, disk space and RAM built into each, which when added up could come to a lot.
Why Servers Consolidation?
Reduce hardware and software costs, including maintenance, upgrade and licensing costs. Reduce total cost of ownership through more optimized staffing, training, space and environment (UPS, backup, airconditioning, etc) utilization and system management. Optimize server performance by faster application deployment and by creating more secure environments. Improve server utilization through higher utilization levels with layered platform software on fewer, more powerful servers. Improve service availability by moving to platforms with high availability features like Active-Active clustering. Reduce cost of support. Outdated servers cost a lot to maintain, and even more to upgrade. o, you might as well consolidate many of them at one time. Similarly, you many have “orphan” applications that cannot be migrated to newer OSes , nor have vendor support , and need to be rewritten afresh.
Consolidation Methodologies:
Logical consolidation Where there is no physical relocation of servers and the goal is to implement common processes and enable standard systems management procedures across the server applications..