Commodity servers are cheap and appear to solve the processing supply and demand problem plaguing large, dynamic environments, which has led to South African businesses commonly running between 100 and 1 000 servers. The result is that these environments either become unmanageable or very expensive to maintain. Bernard Donnelly, consultancy services manager at Unisys Africa, has the solution.
Many businesses would like to reduce the costs associated with operating large numbers of commodity servers, while others simply want to reduce the complexity. Fact is, there are at least five very good reasons to follow suit:
1. Resource utilisation
2. Complexity
3. Staff
4. Flexibility
5. Improved service
Running a large server estate is not simply about the hardware acquisition costs, as many studies have already revealed. With so many servers scattered about the business, administration and software costs deplete IT coffers. The five-year cost of a 100-server environment can easily exceed R20 million.
Part of that cost stems from under-utilisation. With so many smaller servers focusing on specific functions in the business, for tasks such as e-mail and printing, they typically see less than 30% processing utilisation. The reason for that is they must cater for peak demand, which, as the name suggests, accounts for a small percentage of the time the server is working.
In terms of complexity, the more deployed servers the more complex the environment - due to more applications and more hardware. In multi-tier environments this is exacerbated by multiple paths scaling out front-end, back-end and middleware servers. Finding a fault in an environment such as that quickly becomes tricky. Performing an operating system (OS) update is another challenge.
Staffing quickly becomes an issue in scaled-out server environments, not only due to the cost of employing more skilled technicians. While there are many Microsoft Certified Software Engineers (MCSEs) available, there is a limited number who can manage a complex scaled-out environment. In scaled-out environments technicians are typically running around putting fires out instead of applying themselves to proactive management and maintenance.
In scaled-out environments the business loses flexibility. With a large number of applications and servers, making changes is difficult; when more processing power is required for certain applications, the hardware must be upgraded.
Improved service is the result of consolidation onto fewer, more capable servers without removing the cheaper costs of the Wintel environment. A few years ago this would not have been possible, but a new class of Wintel server has been developed, dubbed the Windows mainframe. It offers the scalability of a Unix environment and beyond, but runs Windows operating systems and is based on Intel architecture. The net result of deploying such a system is all the benefits of server consolidation:
* Service to the business is improved as complexity is reduced and uptime improves;
* With applications sharing server resources, utilisation rises to 80%;
* Fewer servers mean fewer software licences and technicians, reducing costs and complexity;
* With fewer technicians, the more skilled ones can be retained for the more efficient central management and maintenance tasks; and
* Flexibility is gained because applications requiring the server horsepower can get it when they need it, while those that do not need it can have less dialled in for the period. For instance, a business intelligence environment with an extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tool can be run on the weekend or overnight and all available processing power redirected to that task. In the morning, processing capacity can be redirected back to the Exchange and database environments.
Overall server consolidation onto a Windows mainframe-class system simplifies and streamlines IT infrastructure to reduce downtime and total cost of ownership. It improves operational efficiencies and increases availability, reliability and performance, leading to faster application deployment and a more flexible business.
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