CAIRO: Server consolidation is on the agenda of nearly seventy five percent of the industries in the coming year, said Dinesh Kapur, regional manager - Enterprise Business, APC, speaking at the recently concluded CIOL C-Change event held at Cairo.

Server consolidation is required to improve availability of resources, by controlling the environment and by correcting past deficiencies, asserted Kapur.

Changing from DC to scalable, modular systems available on demand and additional volume can help achieve desirable information from data. The objective is to improve manageability and stability, he said.

Server consolidation also helps lower TCO and enables efficient use of computing resources. It also simplifies utilization of physical infrastructure and helps to define procedures and harmonize power. The laying out of racks is required to maximize efficiency and minimize space.

Logical and actual systems are still distributed while administration procedures and processes are standardized company wide. As per rational consolidation, the company's distributed applications and servers combine into fewer servers. The move to consolidate distributed servers arises with the need for more servers in a single rack.

This helps in managing the load and controlling heat. Even though the air conditioners perform this job, they do not necessarily offer a good cooling system. He said that the technologies for cooling are changing and are easy to implement also.

“Can we afford the risk of losing data, maintain a stable IT environment and meet future business requirements,' he reasoned out.

He said that cooling is one of the most challenging factors in a data center. The average power usage is 1.4 KW, while the average design capacity is 1.2 KW. He said that 90 percent of the data centers are designed for less than 100 W/sq ft or 3 KW per rack fully loaded.

However, according to Kapur, it is possible to increase cooling of data center by carefully designing the air distribution system.

Designing a proper cold airflow by using cool air ducting system and deploying IP enabled 'intelligent' fans, which remove hot air from the system/rack, are some answers to the problem, he said.