Over the last decade, the number of servers distributed throughout companies has risen dramatically, says Mary Shannon, manager of Amdahl's Server Consolidation Service. Now IT administrators are looking to regain control over their environments, either by managing individual servers as if they were one system or by decreasing the number of servers in-house and centralizing their physical locations.

"It's not terribly risky to do a physical consolidation, but when you don't have the right resources and management capabilities, you can encounter some problems," says Shannon. She says that Amdahl has partnered with Sun Microsystems as a reseller since 1993, providing consolidation services for Unix systems based on Sun's E10000 platform. She adds that new customers will benefit from the technical expertise gained by Amdahl consultants.

Charles Burns, an analyst for Giga Information Group, agrees that Amdahl's years of experience will be helpful to users. "Server consolidation reduces costs and the complexity of running your business, but it's not always for the faint of heart," says Burns. "For years, we have recognized that mainframe consolidation could be done fairly painlessly but [NT and Unix] server consolidation can be problematic."

The service is available worldwide, and pricing will be customized based on user requirements.