Keeping costs down in the data center 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 center.

Consolidating your data center is an effective cost- and energy-savings measure. Consolidation also has the additional benefit of making the data center easier to manage. With fewer physical units to monitor, data center 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 centers.

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 center before creating a consolidation plan.   “One of the first steps in the consolidation process is to assess how well your servers are being utilized,” he says. “You’ll 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.”

Benefits of Consolidation

 

• More speed and reliability within a smaller space
• Reduced network complexity and data center sprawl
• Energy savings and reduced cooling costs
• Reduced hardware costs

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 won’t 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 center 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.”

Assess your hardware needs

Replacing older hard drives with new, high-performance, highly reliable, enterprise-class small form factor drives, or enterprise-class high-capacity hard drives, can lead to further consolidation. These new class of drives will help you replace 2U servers with 1U alternatives, allowing you to fill a rack with twice as many servers while taking up the same footprint

Consolidation bonuses

Consolidation can offer a number of other benefits to your business.

• High-performance drives will enable data systems to deliver more speed and reliability within a smaller space
• With fewer servers to manage and maintain, network complexity and data center sprawl will be reduced
• Selecting low power-consuming enterprise-ready drives combined with fewer servers will result in energy savings
• A reduction in the number of servers running in the data center coupled with the use of low-power/low-heat hard drives will reduce cooling costs
• Using high-capacity drives and fewer servers will result in less spent on hardware

Data consolidation with enterprise-ready drives will lower a company’s fully burdened cost of data center ownership while ensuring higher performance and the highest level of reliability.