Wednesday 1 April 2009

Saving on Servers

The market research company Gartner (www.gartner.com) has just released the latest figures detailing how the big IT companies are doing in these financially turbulent times. Compared to last year, Dell has seen a fall of 11.2% in revenue from server sales indicating that IT budgets have been slashed as companies tighten their belts. IBM appears to have fared worse with a fall of 17.4% in their server sales revenue. As a whole the market has fallen 15% which has had a direct impact on the share prices of these companies, falling between $20-30 in the last 6 months.

In the average data centre, large server purchases have been put on hold until the economy recovers and until companies have more money to invest. The result of this has been that IT staff have been looking for extra space on existing servers, consolidating servers with low activity to free up servers for other uses and thinking about virtualisation. Running a server at 20-30% load does not give value for money from the purchase. It will not fully utilise the multi-core processors and will use comparitively more power per megabyte of information processed than if it was running at 80-100% load. Placing applications like payroll and accounts which only get run monthly or annually and do not clash on the same server, reduces the idle time and increases efficiency.

By consolidating servers you will increase the amount of free rack space and reduce the load on the air conditioning. When these power cost savings are combined with the reduction in the purchasing costs of new equipment large savings can be made.

Migration Solutions specialise in providing vendor independent advise of the design and operation of data centres enabling the optimum return of investment. For further information visit www.migrationsolutions.com.

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