Consolidation

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/02/01/229208/johnson-matthey-consolidates-servers-and-goes-green.htm

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.

Check out this article showing how this manufacturer used server consolidation and sustainability in the IT to become more environmentally friendly, in doing so it saved money and found  some other benefits, an interesting read.

http://www.mysolutioninfo.com/news-display.aspx?Code=5946&t=HP%20Middle%20East%20Resellers%20train%20on%20consolidating%20IT%20infrastructure%20in%20Jor

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.

An article simply to highlight the potential business opportunities in the data center and virtualization fields. HP appear to be training resellers about consolidating the IT infrastructure, showing that issues of data center space continue to be an issue on a global scale.

http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=17649

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.

As we commoditize the platform we’re seeing more and more of these ‘partnerships’ where bank1 and IT company3 form a venture to supply the IT, as well as those IT services businesses like EDS. This article is talking about EDS hiring a new member of the team to head their global financial services division. Issues of outsourcing aside, financial services as an industry has been facing the challenge of getting what it needs from the IT in terms of stability, scalability and performance for its needs whilst controlling the costs and avoiding being diverted from their core business. It will be interesting to see going forward where these kind of service companies sit within the value chain - what level of support is it that you want IT to provide, keep in mind do you really want your application support teams worrying about security patch levels, firmware fixes and infrastructure issues? How much of the IT value chain is it that your business wants to own or run? As we abstract the infrastructure do we want to be owning/managing it?

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/09/26/Ghost-servers-that-haunt-your-bottom-line_1.html

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.

As the server infrastructure grows (virtual or physical) managing the asset as well as everything around it gets more complicated. Take any large data centers with blades and rack servers, and I’ll bet you’ll find at least one server which is either not in use, or not actively doing anything. Taking your asset list, your server inventory, working out what’s doing which role and where it is can be a very effective way of freeing up data center space - that Compaq Proliant 1850 with 256MB ram running NT4 - you sure it’s being used? But keep in mind that sometimes those tier one servers can be the ones that no one has heard off - 68945 particularly if it’s never been rebooted or had an issue.

http://www.vnunet.com/computing/analysis/2198566/case-study-powys-county-council

Powys County Council is cutting electricity use in its data centres by 75 per cent with virtualisation software that reduces server numbers from 80 to four.

The new architecture, which uses Dell hardware to replace the local authority’s obsolete data centres, will also provide an estimated 25 per cent increase in
performance.

The scheme has a significant environmental dimension both reducing electricity use directly and cutting the number of chillers the council needs to cool its equipment.

But with local authorities under pressure to deliver improved services with decreasing budgets, cost is also a compelling motivation, said Powys head
of information and customer services Andrew Smith.

Very cool, check out this article talking about how this council has implemented virtualization as a way of improving the way it provides the infrastructure as well as benefiting from energy efficiency, a good read, check it out.