Consolidation advantages

Consolidation is all about pooling resources to enable greater utilization of assets with greater flexibility. Consolidation can be defined as an approach towards optimizing technologies to achieve cost savings, improve performance, and mitigate risks. This approach involves planning, optimization, and physical migration of systems and facilities. Consolidation is applied to data centers, servers, storage, applications, services and networks.

When people look at consolidation, they are looking at consolidating their applications and servers into fewer footprints. This could be because of power saving, moving from old technology to newer one. When moving to consolidated platform, they enhance production applications by complementing with more powerful storage architecture, says Natarajan.

With increasing pressure on Indian organizations to improve service levels, increase in availability, reduced costs, and better manageability of IT environment is the key. This can be achieved through data center consolidation. Consolidating the data of the company also reduces the need for multiple hardware boxes leveraging the option of doing Information Lifecycle Management in a single storage system thereby reducing data center footprint, power requirement, etc. This drives towards effective utilization of IT resources and cost reduction. All this and much more attracts companies in India towards the adoption of consolidation.

In order to keep up with rapidly changing market demands, customers have focused on day to day business and ignored the growth of individual servers and their dedicated storage. As these storage islands have expanded to more significant capacity levels, total storage utilization across the enterprise and the inability to share data between applications have become inhibitors to further growth.

Guha of Brocade says rapid changes in hardware, technology, and capacity demands are forcing enterprises to implement ongoing server and storage consolidation and data migration strategies to optimize available storage assets. Consolidation enables increased storage utilization by lowering allocation for headroom leading to decreased storage capital expenditures by enabling the purchase of storage on an as-needed basis. Moreover, administrative staff productivity is increased as they are able to manage more storage with fewer personnel. Application downtime is reduced and a centralized network environment for storage and server platforms is created.