Today, there is increasing pressure on IT organizations to improve service levels, increase availability and reduce costs. Organizations are striving to achieve these goals through better manageability of their IT environment. By its nature, being the central location for shared computing resources, the data center is the single most concentrated, complex and strategic component of the IT environment, and therefore is the starting point for pursuing reduced complexity and better manageability.

One approach to achieving these goals is through data center consolidation. In simplifying the environment and increasing its manageability, data center consolidation offers a number of business benefits. Sun Microsystems, one of the thought leaders in this area, identifies four categories of business benefits in data center consolidation:

• Reduced costs (of staff, building and complexity)
• Keeping up with business challenges
• Improving service levels and availability
• Minimizing the impact of external pressures

Sun classifies the various types of data center consolidation opportunities, which lead to significant cost reductions and better manageability, as:

• Data centers (physical locations)
• Servers
• Applications
• Storage
• Shared services
• Networks
• People, resources and processes

In all of these cases, the planning and execution of the data center consolidation have immense implications on the availability/disruption and the level of IT services delivered. In addition, the ability to effectively plan for a data center consolidation directly impacts the IT organization’s ability to perform the implementation on time and on budget.

Planning a data center consolidation requires knowing your current state -- exactly what you have, where it is and its configuration and connectivity -- and designing your desired state. It also requires the ability to communicate all future plans to the appropriate individuals for approval and implementation. Finally, successful data center consolidations are predicated upon having the systems to effectively and efficiently manage and report on the status of the project throughout its duration.

Aperture VISTA® enables organizations to document their exact configuration before a consolidation, visually develop proposals of their desired state to easily be communicated for approval, and effectively manage the project by providing visual status reports along the way. Aperture solutions can help organizations successfully implement data center consolidations on time and on budget, while providing continuity of service to their organizations. For more information on Aperture VISTA, click here.

Third Party Resources

• Business & Industry Solutions: Consolidation -- Sun Microsystems
• Walking the Talk: HP's Atlanta Data Center Solutions Consolidation -- Hewlett Packard
• IT Services Management: Data Center Consolidation Questionnaire -- RL Information Consulting
• Data Warehousing Lessons Learned: Data Mart Consolidation Drivers -- DM Review
• Server and Data Center Consolidation: Microsoft IT Enhances Cost Savings, Availability, and Performance
• Data Center Consolidation: Using Performance Metrics to Achieve Success - SearchNetworking.com
• Data Center Consolidation - Hewlett Packard