Rewards and Risks of Data Center Consolidation

Data Center consolidation is a topic often at the top of IT Operations professionals’ minds. Over time, many organizations’ data center footprints have grown out of control, due to the effects of mergers and acquisitions (adding additional data centers to the mix), local IT Operations and Business Unit purchasing decisions (that often put data center resources close by the teams) and physical limitations on existing resources being overwhelmed, requiring additional data center’s to be added to the mix.

The trend today points to a concerted effort by many organizations to reverse the sprawl. In a recent study Data Center Consolidation: Business Case Metrics (purchase required) published by Computer Economics on August 14^th, 2008 several trends are clear, as described in detail in a review of the report in CIO Update by Allen Bernard.

• 76% of organizations are involved in some level of data center consolidation, increasing from 60% in 2006
• Data Center consolidation efforts often show a 15% to 35% reduction in per server TCO
• Reduction in IT spending per user when data center numbers are reduced

Data Center consolidation projects come with significant risks. Challenges of a consolidation project include:

• Effective project management. These are large projects with many moving pieces, which can easily spiral out of control without tight project management approaches.
• Moving the right systems. It is often difficult for IT operations teams to map server resources to existing applications and IT services, ensuring that all the appropriate systems are moved in a consolidation project. Making sure that when the service is brought up at the new data center, all the required components are available and properly connected is a non-trivial challenge for most teams.
• Availability Impacts. An effective data center migration and consolidation project often requires the move of multi-server, brittle applications and IT services. Often these services have become mission critical to the business and users expect their availability 100% of the time. Moving them in a way that doesn’t jeopardize availability is often challenging.
• Resources. IT operations teams are often resource constrained just keeping the lights on. Effective data center consolidation requires resources to be dedicated to data center consolidation project, with a focus on the long term gains it provides.

Current data and industry trends suggests that IT operations teams are finding ways to have the rewards outweigh the risks involved in Data Center consolidation and migration projects.

What experience have you had with Data Center consolidation? Have the rewards outweighed the risks for your organization?

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Filed Under: IT Operations