Server Consolidation & Virtualization

"Helping businesses reduce and control the number of systems they require in order to deliver the required levels of service for their customers."

Are you running a complex server infrastructure made up of a large amount of multi-vendor hardware?

We have years of expertise in the deployment of virtualisation technologies for server consolidation to put at your disposal. We can help you to consolidate your entire IT infrastructure and also use virtualisation as a tool to further consolidate your storage, network and application environments.

Four basic strategies for server consolidation

Centralisation

- Relocating existing IT assets to fewer sites.

Relocating existing IT assets to fewer numbers of sites can result in economies of scale of operation that provide simplified management and cost improvements. Centralisation is typically the initial consolidation step most companies take. This is often the point where organisations begin to support mergers and acquisitions (co-locating data centres before merging operations and business processes.)

Physical consolidation

- Replacing multiple smaller servers in the same architecture with fewer, more powerful servers.

Many people think of virtualization when they first consider server consolidation. It is the process of reducing the total number of hardware devices by replacing many servers with fewer, more powerful ones or clustered systems when high availability is a necessity. This can take place within the same architecture or across architectural boundaries.

Data integration

- Physically combining a wide variety of data into a single repository.

Data integration involves physically combining data from different sources across the enterprise into a single repository or format. The result is that the merged data resides on fewer servers and/or more centralized and consistent storage devices, which can help to greatly lower the total costs associated with managing and leveraging it for added business value.

File data can be consolidated to a single networked operating system. Multiple types of databases can be converged to fewer database architectures.

Application integration

- Migrating multiple applications to a new platform to take advantage of its technologies and benefits.

Application integration truly breaks the "one application to one server" paradigm prevalent in many Intel processor-based and UNIX environments. It involves consolidating and combining multiple applications and data into fewer server architectures to reduce redundancy and complexity for business process integration and automation.

Application integration also allows for co-locating mixed workloads within a unified infrastructure so that applications can communicate with each other and work together seamlessly. For example, business process synergies can be achieved through the integration of order entry, inventory, fulfillment and accounting systems (Web serving, ERP, business intelligence and other applications) that represent the backbone of the core business.

The benefits of server consolidation:

Reduced costs, increased performance and increased control

• High availability for mission-critical applications, such as ERP and CRM, by using virtual clustering technologies.
• Higher performance, greater scalability, and more capacity.
• Faster response times, by upgrading servers to higher performance systems with the latest server platforms.
• Improved access to information, by consolidating data on fewer servers.
• Increased efficiency, from the integration of existing data and application architectures.
• Lower maintenance and technical support costs, from replacing servers that are close to the end of their life with newer systems that are under a warranty.
• A lower total cost of ownership, due to centralised systems management and associated space and personnel savings achieved from the use of virtualization.
• Improved disaster recovery capabilities, because there are fewer servers to restore.

Contact Origina on +353 (0) 1 2942300 (IRL) / +44 (0) 2033 183790 (UK) / This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to find out how we can help your business today!