In an all too familiar saga taking place in small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) everywhere, file/print, Web, e-mail, and application servers are multiplying at an alarming rate in response to ever-increasing demands for processing power. Initially, the decision to bolster capacity-constrained servers by adding more seems like a reasonable remedy for managing aggressive growth. However, when two-to-three additional servers grows to 10-to-20 over time while being provisioned for extra cycles to accommodate peak loads, this quick-fix solution mushrooms into a major IT problem, leading to accelerated operating costs, increasingly complex administration, and ineffective resource utilization.

Since most SMBs have limited IT support, managing a sea of low-capacity, underutilized servers presents some daunting challenges. Aside from the additional expense of updating operating system versions and keeping software patches current, the tech team must ensure the integrity of all data residing on a platform that has not been optimized for reliability or high availability. Conducting regular backup and recovery operations can put further strain on already overburdened staffers who can't handle the complexity of managing multiple servers with increasingly critical business data.

As a result, more smaller and mid-sized organizations are seeking a simpler, more cohesive server strategy. Instead of dealing with hundreds of dispersed, I/O bound servers, they are migrating to higher-performance platforms along with consolidating their number of servers. According to Mike Karp, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates in Westboro, Mass., moving up market in terms of processing power is an excellent opportunity to simplify infrastructure. "By replacing a handful of smaller servers with a single, high-performance system, companies can take a quantum leap in capabilities and be much better prepared to meet on-demand business requirements," he said.

'Less is More' Drives Server Consolidations
The concept of using fewer servers to do more work is the driving force behind most consolidation efforts. The goals are straightforward: contain costs, streamline management, and improve security while boosting reliability and asset utilization. To that end, selecting a powerful operating system that can handle workload peaks without sacrificing performance and throughput leads many organizations to Linux. As an open source technology, Linux is also less expensive to license than many proprietary operating systems, making it an ideal match for the SMB market segment. Linux has the advantage of being a robust, distributed environment with clustering capabilities that make it inherently more reliable than Windows and much easier to work with than various flavors of Unix. "The benefits of using Linux to build up and out are pretty significant," notes Karp. "As a powerful computing platform, Linux offers good potential for growth."

Today, a wealth of applications and software is available for the Linux environment, further reinforcing its rising appeal. "The long-term value proposition for organizations migrating to Linux is pretty clear," says Andy Wachs, program director for IBM's Linux on Power solutions. "The ability to deploy affordable hardware and take advantage of many more software choices results in lower-cost server deployments."

High-end computing mainstays such as IBM see Linux as an excellent operating environment for SMB customers. Tuned for Linux, IBM's eServer OpenPower servers leverage the company's mainframe heritage and 64-bit architecture with enterprise-class IBM POWER5 processors, as well as additional reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) capabilities. "When consolidating multiple servers onto a single platform, you need a big enough resource that provides the optimal sum of all the parts - with lots of internal disk, memory, adapters, etc.," explains Ron Gordon, IBM program director for pSeries Linux Marketing. "You need a scalable solution that makes it easy to add processors, memory, storage or adapters, as well as cluster them together for higher availability."

Virtualization Enhances Business Flexibility
Previously available on mainframes, virtualization technology is now available on entry-level servers to increase the use of processor, memory, local area network (LAN), and disk resources as well as enhance business flexibility. With virtualization, applications are not bound to particular physical servers, so companies can redistribute resources dynamically to accommodate fluctuating or peak workloads. "Virtualization has gained traction in the storage arena over the past four years as a 'never-ending' C-drive," explains Karp. "Extending this concept of a common resource pool to application servers means it no longer matters which machine is running which application."

Virtualization can produce substantial improvements in performance and reliability. IBM's Hypervisor is an advanced virtualization engine that is incorporated into firmware logic and therefore has less system overhead than third-party virtualization software. The addition of micro-partitioning capabilities enables the IBM POWER processor to run multiple instances of an operating system in independent partitions. Overall resiliency is improved since the operating system running in one partition is protected from events occurring in other partitions. Therefore, the failure of one application is isolated and does not affect other applications running in other partitions.

Consolidating servers onto Linux and taking advantage of virtualization and partitioning lets companies increase business agility while becoming more responsive to their customers' growing demands. Executives can focus more attention on what delivers the most value to their organizations and widens their competitive edge instead of IT intricacies and complexities. With that said, a well-orchestrated consolidation effort requires a phased deployment, starting with a thorough assessment of primary business drivers and processes.

There are many rules for navigating a successful migration effort while ensuring a seamless cut-over to a consolidated environment. "Each company has its own individual technical issues, corporate IT sociology, and business priorities that will be impacted by a consolidation effort," notes analyst Karp. "Start with a review of key business processes, then pick a pilot project to test the different elements of the migration plan."

Backup and Recovery Tops Migration Priorities
A review of existing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and other performance parameters will help establish guidelines for keeping the business running at optimum levels. Additionally, an analysis of general infrastructure should reveal variances between average and peak data traffic, providing a sense of which systems and applications are fast approaching capacity and would be best served by consolidation.

"You can't move to a new platform without first determining how you are going to process-and protect-your vital data," says Wachs. "Backup and recovery should be at the top of the heap of consolidation and migration priorities." In fact, the notion of backing up and restoring mission-critical data becomes much more important in a centralized, consolidated environment since the potential of downtime can affect a much larger percentage of people and processes. For that reason, backup and recovery is often considered one of the most critical applications in any migration effort. "Fortunately, you can achieve better end-to-end support by co-locating backup and recovery so that it protects both physical and virtual servers," he continues. Running backup and recovery in an independent partition provides much tighter control over the entire environment while making it easier to prioritize different workloads, specify resource allocation or share resources to improve utilization.