Fat-free computing

Computerworld - For Gary Owen, the easiest way to talk about Wyndham International is in terms of "before" and "after."

			Related story: Fewer Servers Better Servers During the past decade, IT migrated largely to client/server computing, putting many small servers at distributed sites. Now the trend is toward consolidation, replacing those hundreds or thousands of distributed servers with fewer but more powerful multiprocessor servers at centralized locations. The payoff in overall efficiency can be big. Read Story

"Before" was the time earlier this year when the hotel chain ran 165 servers throughout the U.S. to keep track of guest comings and goings. "After" refers to the slimmed-down network that uses three servers to accomplish the same task. Under the guidance of Owen, the chain's vice president of IT operations, Wyndham embraced the trend of minimizing the number of servers it runs. The company's goals are to reduce hardware costs, simplify administrative chores and to use fewer IT resources.

Still in the installation phase of its consolidation project, Wyndham is already seeing some positive results. The hotel chain expects to pay about 40% less in computer hardware costs this year compared with last year. It's also eyeing administration efficiencies. "In the traditional model, we'd have some type of server at each hotel running a database," Owen says. "From an operations standpoint, that's 165 database servers to back up every night. We now have one database.

"We do a significant software upgrade once a quarter. In the old model, that means a visit from a vendor and the cost of their time and travel to physically upgrade that hotel," he adds. Multiply that by hundreds of hotels in the chain, and it means that once one upgrade is finished, it's time to start on the next one. "In our new model, we will take the system down for a few hours over a weekend and bring up the entire system with the new upgrade," says Owen.

Server consolidation efforts have benefited from new generations of networking gear, such as smart switches, that offer better price/performance ratios today than the hubs and routers of the early 1990s. "Performance and reliability are dramatically better today than five years ago," says Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst in the server technologies group at Illuminata. "Five years ago, a corporation might have used 10Base2 networking [with coaxial cable]; now it uses Category 5 cabling with switches rather than hubs. Technology that used to cost thousands of dollars a port is now merely hundreds of dollars a port.

"In 1995,