October 18, 1999

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Server Consolidation:
Less Is More
continued....page 3 of 3

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But the first step--getting a better handle on where the company's servers were physically located and what was stored on them--proved more difficult than expected. "We were finding servers all over the place. We were finding servers people forgot about," says Fralick. "We were finding them in places where people didn't even know they had servers."

After an inventory, Fralick's team found that Manulife had about 375 Intel servers running various versions of Windows NT, OS/2, and Novell NetWare. On top of that, the company had about 75 Unix servers either running IBM's AIX or Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX. Fralick estimates that by the time the consolidation is completed, Manulife will be down to about 100 IBM and Hewlett-Packard Unix servers and about 275 NT servers.

Cost savings and performance gains are benefits of server consolidation. The downside: getting through the process without major headaches. "The planning is the key part," says analyst Kernochan. Companies have to make sure they lock in on an efficient architecture that will scale with them. "If you design it the wrong way, it will cost you a lot more to back out later," he says. All major hardware vendors--along with a number of systems integrators--have services that can help companies determine what to consolidate. In many cases, they even can help companies carry out the consolidation (see sidebar story, "Vendors Step Up With Server Consolidation Programs").

Manulife engaged the services of IBM to help model its infrastructure and determine if there were opportunities for consolidation. Based on the study, the company was able to prioritize and engage in tasks that would be most cost-effective, both from a dollar and efficiency standpoint, Fralick says. AMA International chose to partner, seeking the advice of both Oracle and Netera, a professional services firm in Berwyn, Pa., to help solidify its strategy. "We're doing everything as a shared team," CIO Alper says. "It's nice to hire a consultant, but you should also get a training experience out of the event. Our people work alongside one or both partners so when the project is finished, our people will own those projects."

Other companies prefer to handle the entire process on their own. The IT staff at CDNow Inc., an online music store in Fort Washington, Pa., with about 400 employees, had to jump into action when the company merged with Music Boulevard, another online music store in Wayne, Pa., owned by N2K Inc. Although both companies were running their operations on Sun Solaris servers, Music Boulevard had created much of its content systems on Windows NT.

Using NT in any capacity wasn't an option for CDNow, however. "We had built a lot of operational procedures and operational excellence based on the Solaris environment, and we felt bringing NT into the mix would require changing the process, which would reduce the ability to achieve excellence," says Michael Krupit, CDNow's chief development officer. Krupit says NT systems are less reliable and more costly to maintain and scale.

So for eight weeks last spring, Krupit led an effort to consolidate the two environments--by "brute force," as he puts it. "They had a bunch of Microsoft Active Server Pages code on a Microsoft Web server and a SQL database with a lot of content," he says. "We just ported the content to our Oracle database in the Solaris environment and then rebuilt the site." Maintaining users' performance during the consolidation effort wasn't difficult, Krupit says, because there were enough redundant servers in production during the transition to handle the workload, which became more streamlined once the consolidation was complete.

Today, every trace of the Music Boulevard's 10 NT servers, which housed the site's content, is gone, and its Sun Solaris servers, which housed its E-commerce applications, have been merged into the CDNow environment, which now consists of about 30 Sun servers, all located in Fort Washington.

CDNow used its own homegrown tools to drive the project, and Krupit attributes its success not only to extensive planning that included assessing the quantity and quality of the data and designing a database appropriate for the needs of the system, but also to the commitment of CDNow employees. "It wasn't difficult to get people motivated to do really solid work when you are doubling the size of the company because of a merger," he says.

Server consolidation is an option that's finding favor with more companies as mergers continue apace, Internet architectures mature, and the flow of information across departments becomes more critical. Says Krupit, "It is possible to achieve more cost-effective scalability, availability, and reliability with a small number of large servers than with a large number of small servers."

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Illustration by Valerie Sinclair
Photo of Krupit by Bill Cramer

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