http://www.techworld.com/opsys/features/index.cfm?featureid=3983&pagtype=samechan

General Motors might be globalising its business, but in the area of servers, the auto-maker is thinking small. “The smallest physical-sized servers have a far better cost per unit of work than the large, 32-CPU-class boxes,” says Mark Hillman, GM’s director of global computing centres. The former will serve as building blocks as the company moves from a project-specific, application-centric focus to a standardised server utility model.

Check out this interesting article which is talking about consolidation projects, it’s an interesting read and illustrates why some companies are adopting consolidation or virtualization within their business. Consolidating systems can be a key way of reducing your hardware support costs and re-claiming data center space, what you have to think about is how you manage these consolidated systems, particularly if the different systems have a service window at different times - front office can go down at different times to back office.