Inchoate Curmudgeon

Server infrastructure consolidation requires analysis of factors beyond the attributes of the servers themselves. Operations and maintenance costs for server infrastructure are important factors, but other factors orthogonal to these attributes will have a large impact on ranking servers for consolidation.

This is particularly true for phased consolidation of servers in the data center, the most likely approach for larger data centers. Certain servers are likely to be more favorable than others for consolidation based on factors like

• the type of applications running on them,
• the business units using them,
• life-cycle considerations for the applications,
• network and security concerns, and
• the release management role of the infrastructure (development, test, production).

Optimization is an iterative process, with each successive cycle seeking to achieve the maximum benefit for the expended effort.

The most effective approach to forced ranking of servers for consolidation must include the additional dimensions of business, life cycle and application service costs in order to resolve to the best optimization candidates, strategies and scenarios.

The diagram presented here does not fully elaborate all of the attributes for the major components of an effective ranking tool, but provides a few typical attributes that are likely to be important in any situation.

The schema has three major axes, the server, the application and the group. The group is an arbitrary collection of servers and applications based on criteria important to stakeholders in the organization, over and above conventional cost factors like server and license costs.

The two axes of server and application may be sufficient in most cases, particularly if groupings are completely disjoint and can be handled by attribution of the servers and applications themselves. The examples given for grouping in the diagram are not very compelling: a given server typically belongs to one business unit, and is only used for one of the release management stages.

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