Server Consolidation

Server consolidation and Virtualisation are hot buzzwords of the Industry today, let us first look at server consolidation. Server consolidation is used to reduce the number of physical servers to reduce the total space utilised in effect and also the real estate cost. In todays business environment Real Estate cost does make a lot of sense with sky rocketing costs in Cosmo's. It also reduces the maintenance and related costs. But then powerful servers are required to carry out the tasks.

There are two kinds of Server Consolidation

1. Logical Server Consolidation : Logical Consolidation i sknowing which applications are running on which servers and utilising how much of CPU power . The same info. can be used for planning the future purchase o0f servers and planning utilization of resources.

2 Physical Server Consolidation : Physical Consolidation deal with reducing the number of total servers deployed.

A point of caution here is that as you reduce the number of servers yo have to make sure you build resilience into your system by planning high availability and fail safe mechanisms. This can be achieved through clustering of servers.