Minimalist Approach

Of interest, consolidating servers for storage-area networks (SANs) ranked No. 2, just after security appliances and just before business-integration tools, such as Web services. For some integrators, this information reinforces what they already are seeing in the marketplace.

"We've been consolidating since the late 1990s," says Marc Duvoisin, national director for enterprise servers and storage at Dimension Data, based in San Francisco. "I would say that from the late '90s, that has been a major emphasis for companies."

In the early 1990s, the market moved from the mainframe, monolithic mindset to open systems, where "everybody could have their own server," Duvoisin says. But that turned out to be a real management headache--and a costly one, too.

In time, and especially when the economy soured, customers started to look at how they could pare down the number of disparate servers within their organizations to reduce management and maintenance costs. Not only did this proliferation of servers inflate management personnel costs, but it meant that IT managers had a built-in, ongoing expense for the numerous application licenses. "Simply put, installing and maintaining multiple servers, storage devices and applications in many different locations is expensive," according to a paper titled "Branch Office Data Consolidation" that was sponsored by vendors EMC, Legato and Microsoft.

The bottom line is that by minimizing the number of servers and storage arrays and housing them in a few key geographical locations, one can reduce the amount spent on hardware, software and support. "Moreover, this strategy eliminates much of the inefficiency associated with managing distributed systems," according to the paper.

Darko Dejanovic, vice president and CTO for Tribune Publishing and Chicago Tribune, says with help from AT&T, Nortel and Sun, his firm is in the process of consolidating 12 servers into two. Those servers are connected to a SAN with a capacity of 38 TB. The 12 servers that were replaced held about half that capacity. "This allows us to save on maintenance costs," Dejanovic says.

Duvoisin says his customers have looked at a couple of methods to streamline their infrastructures. One way is to use more blade servers, which are easy to scale. Another way is to implement a larger server that uses virtualization to create individual virtual servers. "Those are the two technologies we look at when reducing the server footprint," Duvoisin says.

And, of course, the use of a large, centralized SAN can help distribute storage assets more efficiently. Andrew Swansen, regional director for the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Association of Storage Networking Professionals, says that two applications--Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Exchange 2003--have made it easier to consolidate servers and SANs. The back ends of those technologies now fully support SANs. "Windows has become more friendly to SANs," Swansen says. "Windows 2003 is more supportive for SANs. It has embraced SAN technology."

Microsoft Exchange 2003, in particular, has made it easier for IT managers to support a large number of end users with a single server. In fact, he says with the 2003 application version, a company can reduce its number of exchange servers by 40 percent compared with the Microsoft Exchange 5.5 version.

But as an IT manager, Swansen still echoes the old, familiar complaints about SANs. They continue to be difficult to implement. Specialized personnel are needed to manage the technology, and the upfront costs of implementing a SAN are still high, ranging from $300,000 to $600,000. "You are talking serious money," Swansen says.