Top 5 benefits of server consolidation

The general reasons for consolidation at any level – increase efficiency, reduction in total cost of ownership via less assets plus simplification of administration – are magnified at the level of Server Consolidation.

Here are our top 5 benefits for server consolidation

Reduce hardware costs
The most obvious benefit of Server Consolidation is quite simply that the organisation needs to purchase less servers. The initial cost of purchasing an enterprise server is not inconsiderable, but this is not the end of the cost of owning an enterprise server…

Reduce operating costs
There are many costs associated with keeping a physical server running, and available for use. Hardware support agreements, operating system licenses, software licenses, electricity required by both the server & the data centre temperature control system – all add up to an ongoing cost.

Consolidated administrative tasks
With fewer, and standardised, servers – standard administrative tasks such as backup, patching, monitoring, and reporting become simpler. Rather than multiple solutions for each task, for each subset of servers – a single backup strategy and/or monitoring solution can be implemented easily. The size of the patching database is reduced by a magnitude for every standard put into place, and the number of systems to patch reduces linearly with every server consolidated.

Reduce environmental impact
Many organisations today are striving to meet obligations, either regulatory or self-imposed, to reduce their environmental footprint. One of the largest environmental effects of any IT department is the data-centre. Reducing the number of physical servers maintained is a huge step in reducing CO2 emissions.

Centralised management
A smaller number of (ideally standardised) servers makes a centralised management structure much simpler to implement. A standardised consolidated strategy towards servers allows creation of a clean, simple view of the IT estate for IT management for monitoring both current state and future growth, while also enabling a 'Dashboard' type view of the estate for the executive level.

It would be up to your Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server consultancy company to ensure your data centre strategy will realise all the benefits highlighted.