Keeping costs down in the data centre is difficult, as data storage and management requirements are constantly growing. In order to make the best use of resources, you may want to reduce the number of servers in your data centre.

Consolidating your data centre is an effective cost and energy-savings measure. Consolidation also has the additional benefit of making the data centre easier to manage. With fewer physical units to monitor, data centre staff can complete their tasks in less time.

In addition to reducing the number of servers, it’s possible to reduce the number of physical data centres.

Do a full assessment

Chaz Nichols, Enterprise Computing Segment Marketing Manager at Seagate, talks about the importance of doing a full assessment of your data centre before creating a consolidation plan.   “One of the first steps in the consolidation process is to assess how well your servers are being utilised,” he says. “You will want to gather performance data on your hardware and the applications running on it, to determine the efficiency of your current operation. If you have servers that are idle much of the time, or running at less than half capacity, you may be able to combine these servers to better use the available resources.”

Before combining servers, create a test bed to simulate the current environment and experiment with changes before making them. During this experimental phase, you should stress test the environment to make sure your consolidation plan will work and will not impact your ability to meet service level agreements. Nichols adds, “Keep experimenting until you find a combination of hardware and services that allows you to consolidate your data centre without having a negative impact on performance. Although it may take some time to find the right solution, this will save you time and money in the future.”