Server Consolidation

Server consolidation can be a cost-effective strategy for IT system rationalization. Major benefits of consolidation include:

• A considerable reduction of IT system running costs by cutting the cost of IT management and maintenance (reduced hardware and software costs)
• A reduction of the number of elements to be managed, offering real savings in storage space and power consumption as well as the ability to define a viable and efficient business recovery plan

However, a server consolidation project may come up against major obstacles such as:

• A lack of information about workloads, machine resource consumption and the specific behavior of each application
• Having to choose between several solutions for consolidation and virtualization without any decision-making aids

To guarantee the success of a consolidation project, Sysload leverages its server monitoring and capacity analysis functions:

• Identification of over- or under-utilized resources in order to identify systems to be consolidated
• Determining system dimensions by analyzing and modeling typical utilization profiles of different applications, thus allowing an objective evaluation of the resources needed to run each application
• Monitoring of virtualized environments via industry-leading technology for VMware, AIX and Solaris

Simplify your IT system with Sysload

IT system consolidation requires organization and planning supported by a reliable and objective information source. Sysload offers all the tools you need for your consolidation project before, during and after implementation.

Pre-consolidation

The wide-ranging metrics collected on systems and applications by Sysload modules allow the definition of intelligent and consistent performance and utilization indicators.

• These indicators allow you to effectively evaluate the capacity and utilization of each of the servers concerned.
• The indicators also allow precise mapping of each of the applications concerned by determining their individual load on overall system resources

The continuous approach recommended by Sysload, comprising both the study of real-time data and the projection of trends over the medium- or long-term, makes it possible to know which resources are available (capacity) and what resources are required for the hosting of each of the applications (utilization).

The consolidated environment

Sysload carries out 24x7 monitoring of consolidated and/or virtualized production environments.

• Validating the consolidation/virtualization option by monitoring the various scenarios deployed in pilot projects
• Continuous monitoring approach for consolidated production resources in order to improve management of IT system resources (dynamic reallocation of resources, operational diagnostics of virtualized OS’s, etc.)

Sysload supports the latest virtualization technologies, such as logical partitions on Solaris 10, LPAR partitioning on AIX 5.3 and i5/OS and the VMware ESX virtualization platform.