Opportunities & Benefits
In a typical legacy environment, a myriad of servers of different makes, models and operating systems will be filling up data centre space. By addressing server consolidation when migrating legacy systems, organisations can achieve significant financial and operational benefits.
Agenor's approach to server consolidation takes three forms:
- Shared Server Solution: By implementing an enterprise scale shared server, many applications can be co-hosted on a single server. This solution often delivers increased availability due to the features of the server hardware and provides a standard, common platform for a range of applications.
- UNIX Virtualisation: Similar to the shared server solution, this approach exploits enterprise level hardware in combination with UNIX virtualisation capabilities. Individual application components are deployed in Virtual UNIX servers, providing an isolated OS for each individual application.
- VMware Virtualisation: Server consolidation has been the proof-point of VMware's virtualisation product sets. Aimed primarily at the burgeoning Windows server estate, consolidation can be achieved at ratios of 10:1 or greater. VMware provides a proven server consolidation and containment solution used by organisations of all types and sizes worldwide, including all of the Fortune 100.
The benefits of Server Consolidation can be summarised as follows:
- Significantly reduced costs - by reducing the number of servers required
- Improved utilisation of physical resources
- Simplified server provisioning
- Increased responsiveness to new business demands
- Enhanced ability to plan for and contain server capacity increases
- Reduced data center environmentals (power, cooling, cabling, floorspace)
These benefits have a critical impact on the Business Case for legacy systems migrations.