InformationWeek

October 18, 1999

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Server Consolidation:
Less Is More
IT managers seek control over sprawling architectures

By Karen D. Schwartz

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erver sprawl causes many of the same problems in businesses that urban sprawl does in communities--haphazard growth, rising infrastructure costs, and management headaches plague IT executives as much as they do state legislators. Increasingly, IT executives are taking steps to regain control over their environments.

The idea is called server consolidation, and it seeks to modify the excesses of distributed computing architectures run amok, to streamline operations after mergers are finalized, or to bring a measure of consistency to expanding businesses that never implemented a firm IT strategy. Gaining peace of mind is a nice side benefit.

For some companies, server consolidation takes the form of replacing many small servers with fewer but more powerful, larger units. Others relocate existing servers to fewer sites. IT managers may plan to combine different application workloads within a single server, or migrate multiple applications to a new platform.

Whatever the strategy, server consolidation is on the upswing. According to Forrester Research, 60% of 50 IT managers in a recent survey said they were in the midst of a server-consolidation project. Another 10% had just completed one, while 20% said they had plans to undertake such a project within the next two years.

At American Management Association International, a development and training firm in New York, CIO Bruce Alper says consolidating servers was the only way to restore coherency to the firm's infrastructure, and prepare the business for an expected growth spurt. When Alper took over as CIO last year, he inherited a technological mess--aging servers, legacy applications that didn't talk to each other, and a lack of any comprehensive technology strategy. "The systems were simply fractured after 10 years of incremental growth," Alper says. "It's a classic situation for a growing corporation."

Bruce Alper Photo by The firm was supporting six hardware platforms, seven operating systems, five databases, and outdated software from a variety of vendors. To make matters worse, a different set of applications was running at each of four sites around the country. A complicated series of manual processes glued everything together. Still, various iterations of data that were out of sync with each other forced users to guess which data authority was correct.

Because of the confusion, the IT staff didn't have time to focus on developing the expertise necessary to support the company adequately. When staff members left, it wasn't uncommon for them to take all of the knowledge about a particular platform with them.

Alper decided to start over from the ground up. He chose to consolidate most operations on Sun Solaris servers running a suite of Oracle applications as the company's core software platform: Oracle Financials, Oracle TeleBusiness, and Oracle CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Alper says he expects that these applications will provide his firm with the capabilities it needs to meet its goal of doubling revenue to $600 million within three years. AMA International has also standardized on Lotus Domino and Notes and Infinium Human Resources.

The consolidation started in earnest in January, and Alper expects it to be about 90% completed by May. The final tally will have AMA International using 10 servers, down from 75 systems that included an IBM mainframe, a host of IBM AS/400 and RS/6000 servers, and more than 20 servers running Microsoft Windows NT.

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