Infrastructure planning for CIOs

This Executive Guide is part of the SearchCIO Executive Guide series, which is designed to give IT leaders strategic guidance and advice that addresses the management and decision-making aspects of timely topics. For a complete list of topics covered to date visit the Executive Guide section.

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Expert's Corner

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The ROI of server consolidation

Tom Pisello

Server consolidation is one of the most effective ways to lower TCO of a company's data center. Typically performed using one of the four strategies highlighted here, server consolidation methods can be applied independently or simultaneously.

Physical consolidation: This means collecting servers distributed across multiple remote/branch offices and business units into a central data center.

Pros: The team can improve configuration control by restricting server access, and strengthening business resilience through the superior data center infrastructure and security. It can also eliminate the cost of moves, add-ons, and changes (MACs), as well as break-fix maintenance and support by eliminating travel time and expenses.

Physical consolidation can help the team reduce complexity and more easily standardize purchases, configurations and management best practices. Costs to implement physical consolidation are low, and consist of network enhancements to support the centralization, data center build-out to support the consolidation, and physically moving the servers. Ultimately, IT labor savings can reach 10%.

Cons: The risks are performance degradations due to poor network planning and business resilience risks by having all of the server assets in "one basket," particularly if the data center does not have adequate recovery plans.

Re-hosting: Porting from older legacy platforms and operating systems to newer solutions often results in consolidation, as fewer new high-performance systems are typically needed to support the workload.

Pros: Depending on the age of a legacy system, expensive support and maintenance contracts can be eliminated. Since the number of administrators and support labor is usually correlated to the number of individual servers, having fewer servers generates proportional administration and support labor savings.

Migrating the operating system to a newer version enhances availability, security, management features and performance, and provides better upgrade options.

Cons: If the proposed system for re-hosting is not compatible with the prior systems, the application may require porting to another platform, custom code rewrites, procedures and data migration. Porting costs are often underestimated.

>> Click here to read the full tip on achieving ROI through server consolidation

Tom Pisello is the founder and CEO of Orlando, Fla.-based Alinean, an ROI consultancy and software provider. He can be reached at tpisello@alinean.com. For more information and exclusive access to server TCO analysis tools and white papers, visit http://www.alinean.com.

Servers

Table of Contents

• Article: Revised server energy efficiency standard due by year's end (Source: SearchDataCenter.com, Sept. 28, 2006)
• Article: Managing remotely hosted servers (Source: SearchCIO.com, July 30, 2006)
• Article: Wellness at your service (Source: SearchCIO.com, April 4, 2006)
• Article: Virtualization user bounces back from failure (Source: SearchStorage.com, March 15, 2006)
• Article: Foxwoods casino bets on virtualization (Source: SearchCIO.com, Feb. 10, 2006)

Servers

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• Article: University's server availability up 30% as result of consolidation (Source: SearchCIO.com, May 25, 2006)
• Fast Guide: Server consolidation (Source: SearchDataCenter.com, March 25, 2006)
• Column: Is there any value in storage consolidation? (Source: SearchStorage.com, March 22, 2006)
• Article: Wisconsin CIO gets slammed on Oracle e-mail debacle (Source: SearchCIO.com, March 8, 2006)

Open source

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• Article CIOs take a top-down approach to open source (Source: SearchCIO.com, Aug. 31, 2006)
• Tip: The assembly methodology using SOA and open source software (Source: SearchCIO.com, Aug. 21, 2006)
• Article Open source lures cost-conscious CIOs (Source: SearchCIO.com, Aug. 1, 2006)
• Column: The real reasons vendors are moving to open source models (Source: SearchCIO.com, March 29, 2006)
• Column: Voice your open source concerns now (Source: SearchCIO.com, Feb. 7, 2006)

Operating systems

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• Article: Microsoft readies management bundle for midsized users (Source: SearchWinIT.com, July 29, 2006)
• Article: Wake up! Patch needed for 2007 DST change (Source: SearchSMB.com, March 29, 2006)
• Ask the Expert: What are the security concerns for maintaining a mix of operating systems on the same host? (Source: Expert Answer Center)
• Quiz: Operating systems (Source: SearchOpenSource.com)

Upgrades

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• Ask the Expert: Evaluating the potential ROI of an SAP upgrade (Source: SearchSAP.com, March 29, 2006)
• Ask the Expert: Building a business case for a CRM upgrade (Source: SearchSAP.com, March 29, 2006)
• Learning Guide: Preparing for an iSeries upgrade (Source: Search400.com, Jan. 30, 2006)
• Tip: Reduce upgrade unknowns with the SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Advisor (Source: SearchSQLServer.com, Jan. 29, 2006)

More resources

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• SearchDataCenter.com
• Data center directions
• SearchStorage.com