As potential IT consolidation projects go, the idea of reducing the number of servers a firm operates and possibly locating them all in one data centre if they are geographically dispersed is the one that often springs first to mind.
The concept is appealingly simple, not least because it has a physical dimension that gives it a tangible appeal to non-technically minded management, particularly in terms of costs savings and performance improvement.
However, one might expect that the trend towards server consolidation would affect sales of the machines themselves. Not according to IDC, which reported a 7.7 per cent year-on-year growth in West European server sales in the first quarter of 2004. ‘The perpetual quest for improved TCO (total cost of ownership), increased attention on server utilisation and the end-of-life of some technologies prompt corporate IT decision makers to transform existing IT infrastructure through consolidation projects, which in turn generates new server sales,’ said Nathaniel Martinez, a senior analyst with IDC’s European Server Group.
A separate IDC survey of the Western European public sector shows that the demand for servers (and data storage) systems is expected to grow over the next several years to support increased automation and the digitisation of processes.
Both IBM and HP consolidated their leadership on the European server market, according to IDC, growing their revenue by more than 10 per cent in the first quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. IBM, which experienced growth across all the major server segments, also grew its Linux server revenues by 67.9 per cent compared to the first quarter of 2003 but overall still remains second to HP.
HP grew its factory revenue by 11.7 per cent compared to a year ago, largely fuelled by a 27.6 per cent increase in its Windows server business, and grabbed 30.4 per cent revenue share. Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu Siemens, meanwhile, experienced annual revenue declines of 5.5 per cent and 1.7 per cent, respectively. Dell grabbed 6.8 per cent market share of servers sold in Europe and gained 1 per cent revenue share compared to a year ago.
These IDC figures, particularly the performance of Sun Microsystems so far this year, shows just how much the big three computer makers, IBM, Dell and HP have captured server market share from Sun with low-end, low-cost Intel-based servers than can run a
variety of operating systems, including Linux. The attractive price/performance ratio of these low cost machines, particularly if they run free Linux software, is undoubtedly forming the basis of many an updated and consolidated server infrastructure.
However, Ciaran Doherty, sales director with Horizon Open Systems, maintains that Linux is a key part of Sun Microsystems’ server strategy and provides strong support to Red Hat and other Linux distributors as well as the Open Source developer community.
Sure enough, Sun has been actively combating the ‘Lintel’ threat, with AMD processor equipped machines that can run Solaris, Linux or even Windows software. He said that Sun’s Solaris offerings are of a ‘comparable price performance’ to those of its rivals.
He adds that volume sales of Sun’s servers have risen strongly, but this is possibly at the expense of Sun’s more lucrative models, according to US industry reports.
Neutrality
Enthusiasm for open standards has clearly influenced computer makers’ strategies with regard to server processors and operating systems. Doherty of HOS says that source code for the planned version 10 of its Solaris software is to be released to the Open Source community. Sun Microsystems also supports Solaris on machines running Intel x86 chips, including those made by Dell, HP and IBM. It was recently reported that the company is even considering porting Solaris on to IBM’s Power chips and Intel’s
Itanium.
HP will eventually phase out its own brand RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processors: the PA-RISC that has long powered its Unix servers and the Alpha, which it inherited from Digital via the purchase of Compaq. These will be replaced by Intel
Itanium chips. The firm has also been vocal about its Linux strategy with a series of announcements in support of the JBoss application server and MySQL database.
IBM has also been very enthusiastic about Linux but has refocused its efforts more recently on Unix. Last month, it launched a new range of Unix servers to be based on the company’s next generation Power5 processors. The servers will range in size from dual-
processor to 16-way systems and can run both Unix and Linux. The company says it is aiming these servers at those customers who want to mix and match, such as buy their own middleware, their own applications and their own database, rather than going for a
complete turnkey system.
‘When people look at server consolidation the primary driver is cost savings,’ said Cliff Berereton, IBM’s Linux manager for Northern Europe. ‘These aims have been achieved but we’ve also seen consolidation around Linux, which has brought about better
performance, greater reliability and security improvements.’
He said there remains a lot of customers who will still want to their systems to remain a primarily Unix flavour, but also be able use Linux in terms of scaling out. ‘Linux is not as mature as AIX-flavoured Unix, but at the end of the day it’s down to customer choice,’ he said.
Neil Mullaney, managing director of IBM specialist reseller Unitech, says IBM is committed to providing greater availability of different systems so that customers are no longer tied to proprietary hardware for business critical applications. ‘They don’t mind what kind of hardware it’s on, it’s more about the ability to deliver a project,’ he said.
IBM’s P5 release is of some significance, he said, because it will allow a number of partitions to run a number of different operating systems at the same time. The P5 chips run IBM’s Virtualisation Engine technology to divide each processor core into as many
as 10 virtual servers, a feature not available on Power4-based systems.
Reducing cost and complexity
One of the key reasons for server consolidation is to reduce costs or lower TCO, mainly through a better utilisation of server resources. A common statistic often bandied about is that only 20 per cent of server capacity is typically used. A common goal of a server
consolidation project is to up that utilisation rate to about 70 per cent.
‘There is a view that we have too many servers,’ says Doherty of HOS. ‘But organisations will typically spend 20 per cent of their IT budget on hardware and the other 80 per cent on keeping systems supported and running. The key is to reduce the operational spend.’
By a logical extension, reducing costs generally tends to mean reducing complexity and making the system easier to manage. One way of doing this is possibly to consolidate as much as possible to equipment from a single hardware supplier, but this of course is
easier said than done.
Nevertheless, the scale of a server consolidation is often determined by the commonality of operating systems and applications. ‘Customers are specifically consolidating environments that share a common operating system, such as Windows, HP-UX and IBM’s AIX, says Mullaney. ‘Now they are consolidating applications that can share a load on machines in logical partitions.’
The extent of an IT consolidation is driven by the applications themselves, not the hardware, says Simon Sparrow, HP’s marketing manager for industry standard servers.
‘What we are finding is that customers are beginning to categorise their applications in to low-utilisation, medium and high utilisations,’ he said. Lesser used applications running on, for instance, Windows-based servers, can be made into virtual machines through virtualisation engines such as VMware, and represents a sure fire cost saving, he says. Applications that previously used as many as 15-20 servers can be ported onto to one high performance machine.
The current generation of partitioning technology is able to separate single machines into separate partitions so that different applications can run on it, but the next level, says Sparrow, is partitioning that enable multiple operating systems to run on the same machine.
However, at the moment, customers are nervous about using partitioning managers to run mission-critical applications on the same machine, but with lower-utilisation applications people don’t mind putting all their eggs into one basket, according to Sparrow.
Sometimes these decisions may even by influenced by internal politics, as the HR department may say they want to maintain their server for their own applications, rather than share it with the financial department.
Porting more applications onto fewer and sometimes smaller machines also raises the options provided by blade servers, which can be utilised to share the burden of application demands by horizontally scaling across a number of machines in a pool as
opposed to vertical scaling on single machines. However, a move to a blade server architecture usually requires a large investment, says Sparrow, in that you cannot just buy two server machines and slot into a non-blade architecture. Doherty says that in Sun’s
experience, users are using multiple-CPU blade servers for a specific purpose, such as firewalls, directories or Web servers.
Let’s get physical
Although IT platforms bring their own influence to bear on the scale and scope of server consolidations, a decision to centralise geographically dispersed architecture to a single location or a data centre raises a number of engineering issues that have to be considered.
At Interxion’s data centre in Dublin, the trend towards physical server consolidation has translated into solid business gains for the company’s co-location and hosting services. Sales director Jason O’Conaill says that the advantages of locating all of a firm’s servers
at a data centre are that space can be freed up in offices that once housed the equipment, but these same offices would also have struggled to manage the power and cooling issues created by large numbers of servers stacked closely together.
‘There can be up to 30 servers in a single data centre rack,’ says O’Conaill. The advancement in server technology performance has led to demands from customers for smaller form factors packed in to a smaller space. Interestingly, the company is housing a considerable number of smaller Intel based servers, such as HP’s Proliant, Dell’s PowerEdge and IBM’s xSeries.
Mullaney of Unitech, however, suggests that physical server consolidation usually happens within a firm’s own comms room or in-house data centre. He also said that cooling is less of an issue than it used to be in these situations because today’s servers are
all efficiently air cooled with multiple fans, as well as being less power-hungry. HP’s Sparrow points out, however, that 65 per cent of a server’s power is taken by processor, and as processors get more powerful, heat outage will be a bigger issue.
Mullaney says power remains an important issue though with regards to dealing with outages. ‘If you have systems sharing a common something you need multiple power sources, at least two separate power circuits,’ he said.
Whatever the drivers for a server consolidation project, it is rarely considered as a point solution, rather as part of a larger IT infrastructure consolidation effort. ‘Consolidation means different thing to different people but at the end of the day, it should make an overall system more reliable, easier to manage and cheaper to run,’ says Sparrow.
One server is big enough for two jobs
Although relatively small as server consolidation projects go, VHI Healthcare’s implementation of a single higher-end server to run a critical document management application represents what is likely to be the first in a series of IT consolidation projects, if the IT manager has his way.
Conall Lalor, VHI Healthcare’s IS operations manager, says IT consolidation has long been a topic of conversation among staff at VHI but comes up against the same issues as many other firms of a similar size and scope.
‘Consolidation is an ongoing topic on the agenda. It’s fine and dandy if you are consolidating common or standard applications on multiple servers, but in reality most companies have a lot of very different applications from different vendors.’
For this project, the advantage of using a single server, instead of several smaller ones, to run both a major new document management application and its attendant development system was clear. ‘Ultimately we were able to buy one server with enough capacity to power the entire application suite,’ said Lalor.
As well as buying one server with enough capacity to power the entire application suite, VHI also explored with HP the possibility of partitioning that server so it could run the disparate processes independently of one another.
The consolidated system is based on a ProLiant DL740 8-processor server running HP’s ProLiant Essentials Workload Management Pack software on a Windows 2000 Advanced Server operating system.
Lalor says the advantage of the single server is that it is easier and cheaper to upgrade with more processors and more memory. ‘It’s allowed us to operate a machine that would grow more readily and have an increased life cycle.’
Prior to this project, Lalor had considered taking on virtualisation software, such as VMWare, to allow installations of two or three editions of Win 2k on a single machine, but there was too much of a question mark over the compatibility of VMware with Win 2k. However, he is very interested to learning more about Microsoft’s forthcoming virtualisation software, Virtual Server 2005.
As for consolidation projects in general, Lalor reckons there are three main issues to consider: centralising hardware into one location; standardising on a particular vendor as this enables staff to react more quickly to problems and requires less skill sets; and the implementation of a change management policy to control what is happening, regardless of whether or not consolidation takes place.
27/09/04
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