Service providers are increasingly touting “server consolidation” as a sure way to cut costs in IT sourcing contracts. Providers typically offer guaranteed price decreases based on a commitment to reduce the total number of client servers. However, guaranteed decrease in price shouldn’t drive hasty contract signing.

The two primary alternatives include: consolidation guarantees within a sourcing contract via contractual price reductions, and project by project consolidation efforts.

According to the EPA, computing data centers alone accounted for about 1.5 percent of all electricity used in the US in 2006. IBM’s newest mainframe computer, the System z10, offers a step up in processing, but also a big step forward in reducing power and cooling costs.

The new machine is designed to be up to 50 percent faster than its predecessor, the z9, and it has as much as 70 percent more capacity. That gives z10 the computing power of nearly 1,500 x86 servers. And, it takes up 85 percent less space and uses about 85 percent less energy.

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.

Precious metals and chemical manufacturer Johnson Matthey is embarking on server consolidation and IT sustainability initiatives to cut costs, raise the company’s environmental leadership profile, and prepare for future environmental legislation.

“Consolidation and sustainability go hand in hand because we can reduce our carbon footprint by streamlining production systems,” said Stephen Way, IT director for Johnson Matthey’s precious metal products division.

The programme will focus on intelligent power management and server consolidation through virtualisation at the company’s datacentres in London and Royston.

The state of Oregon is embarking on a data center consolidation and virtualization project that officials say will save $10 million to $12 million per year.

The project, which costs $43 million, was started in 2005 with the construction of a new data center in Salem, the state capital, in which 11 separate state agency data centers serving 45,000 employees will be consolidated. The project is scheduled to conclude in June 2009 with a new Gigabit Ethernet backbone and virtual circuits replacing a frame relay network to support new applications and a converged infrastructure.

11 December 2007 - DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - HP Middle East today announced its resellers training programme on ‘Consolidating IT Infrastructure’ which took place lately in Jordan.

HP Certified Professionals gathered at the Dead Sea, Jordan to further their learning about storage and server consolidation academy over a three day period. HP pre-sales engineers attending the sessions focused on solutions that enable customers to provide the best IT service possible to their businesses - while at the same time cutting budgets to enable them to drive their businesses forward.

The HP Enterprise Storage & Servers group offers integrated IT consolidation solutions with technologies and methodologies that help organizations standardize and simplify their IT environments.

Loading up servers on a truck and transporting on I-95 is certainly not the most “IT” way of data center consolidation. It is not the most techy way, nerdy way or even a cowboy way. And if you had to do this (first of all, don’t), at least pick a different Interstate. It takes too long to get anywhere on I-95.  Should I even ask if the guys had a prepared a special full backup before that stupid-a-move ? (and that those backup tapes are not in the same truck as the equipment)

No one looks forward to a data center migration. Consolidation of multiple data centers is even a bigger headache. Because of the dollar amount of the equipment and the event involved, it is quite normal and standard procedure to employ specific move management firms that handle all aspects of this operation. Even then, there will always be something that will go wrong. Get this in your head early - there is no such thing called a “smooth operation” here. I have not heard of any.

US IT services firm EDS has hired former Westpac technology chief Michael Coomer to lead its global financial services division.

Coomer was most recently group executive, business and technology services for Westpac where he was responsible for IT, e-business, outsourcing governance and all back-office operations and support. He retired from the bank in July this year.

Prior to his post at Westpac, Coomer spent four years as chief information officer at National Australia Bank, where he was responsible for leading all IT activities in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the UK and the US.

He has also worked for IBM Global Services, Ansett Transport Industries and Rockwell International.

The bank has deployed its transaction and payments processing system - SNS Administration System (SAS) - on a JBoss Application Server supplied by open source outfit Red Hat. SAS provides services to over 3300 workstations that produce over 500,000 transactions on a daily basis at bank branches across the Netherlands.

By moving to Application Server SNS Bank has benefited from reduced licence costs, increased stability and reliability and a reduction in hardware demands, compared with its Pascal-based system, says Red Hat.

The bank is now able to run the entire system on eight IBM X-series servers, with enough spare capacity to support over 2000 additional workstations.

The problem may not rival the movies Poltergeist or The Amityville Horror for sheer terror, but CIOs and datacenter managers are still well advised to deal decisively with so-called ghost servers. Like celluloid zombies, these forgotten pieces of equipment are dead when it comes to improving the bottom line, but they are very much alive when it comes to eating up IT budgets.

The unproductive — and usually undocumented — servers take up valuable real estate, consume increasingly expensive electricity and, in some cases, absorb ongoing maintenance and lease payments.

“You can find ghost servers in a lot of enterprises,” says John Phelps, an analyst at Gartner. “And the larger and more diverse the company, the harder it can be to have a single group or technology platform that provides control over all corporate assets.”

Sun Microsystems, through case studies of two large corporate datacenter operations and anecdotal analysis of efforts with many customers, believes that 8 percent to 10 percent of all servers in large corporations have no identifiable function. In the two datacenter studies, 150 ghost servers were found in an installation of 1,800 servers, and 354 ghost servers were found in an installation of 3,500 servers.