Server consolidation a priority for some data center operators

Computerworld - PHILADELPHIA -- CIOs at the first Enterprise Management World (EMW) here today see server consolidation as a means of reducing management complexity in data centers and saving on the need to buy more server hardware.
A significant majority of installed servers still serve only one application and utilization rates can be far below those of mainframes, showing they can be used more efficiently, said Kelly Quinn, an analyst at IDC who spoke at the event.
In one case study presented by Dennis Callahan, CIO at The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America in New York, server utilization has shot up to nearly 50% in the past 18 months, with a goal in coming years of nearly 70%.
The improvement was accomplished by stacking applications on each server, sometimes four or five different applications per server, said Guardian's Bob Mathers, second vice president of IT operations.
In addition, newer IBM blade servers were installed to handle the application stacking, raising utilization rates in some cases from 4%, up to 40% to 50%, Mathers said. In the past 18 months, the financial services company has reduced the number of servers from 1,100 to 900.
He estimated that the change is saving Guardian "millions of dollars a year," savings that come even as Guardian spent $1 million for new Unix-based IBM servers based on IBM's Power5 RISC-based processor. Mathers wasn't sure which server models are being installed, however.
The cultural shift arising from having several workgroups share a single server wasn't difficult, he said. But Mathers acknowledged the conventional wisdom that workgroups are sometimes responsible for the number of underutilized servers, because each workgroup often insists on having its own server for a specific function.
"We didn't have that at Guardian because there was a climate of change, which started when [Dennis] Callahan arrived four years ago," Mathers said.
By contrast, Brig. Gen. Brad Butler, deputy CIO at the U.S. Air Force, said that some "social engineering" has taken place in the past three years among Air Force users, who agreed to turn off servers in a bid for greater server efficiency.
Several squadrons at an Air Force base, for example, might each have had separate e-mail servers that could be consolidated. The net result after consolidation took place was that 4,000 servers were eliminated -- along with 1,000 domains, he said. Butler said he is unsure how many servers and domains remain, but he pointed to what he said is $100 million in maintenance savings a year.
The Air Force has anIT budget of about $6.4 billion, and serves some 800,000 users globally, he said.
Despite some initial resistance to the consolidation, users realized "they didn't give up control as much as gained efficiency," Butler said.
EMW, which is co-sponsored by Computerworld and the Distributed Management Task Force, got under way yesterday and runs through Wednesday.