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Home Services Consult And Change Dynamic Datacenter Server & Storage Consolidation

Server & Storage Consolidation

Computacenter's structured approach helps organisations to reduce complexity and inefficiency through consolidation at the logical, physical and application levels

A service component of our Dynamic Datacenter solution.

What we do

To understand whether consolidation is appropriate for your organisation, we start by understanding your business and technical goals, and comparing these against existing infrastructure investments. This typically results in a Return On Investment (ROI) business case which outlines the best approach to consolidation, the expected investment and likely benefits.

Following this, Computacenter will conduct a detailed review of your environment, identifying all software and hardware dependencies, redundancies, and inefficiencies. Based upon this mapping, we validate which elements of the infrastructure can be consolidated, and which components can be standardised to more stable platforms. Additionally we consider where innovative solutions such as de-duplication to reduce storage requirements, or shared data architectures to support scalable database farms, can help in the new consolidated estate.

We then develop a plan to ensure streamlined and effective consolidation, helping you validate the new environment to minimise risk. Finally, we work with you to implement your migration plan and drive the project through to completion.

How it helps

Reduced costs
Consolidation projects have the potential to deliver significant cost savings very quickly. Consolidation not only reduces financial spend, but also helps avoid the costs of downtime, such as support effort and loss of business. Fewer large servers cost less to manage and maintain than many small ones. Where appropriate, Computacenter can underwrite the cost savings identified within our recommendations.

Simplified management
Datacenters have seen significant growth in application deployment. Trying to manage a distributed infrastructure, with disparate platforms and processes is difficult and costly, as it only serves to increase complexity. Limiting the number of operating systems simplifies IT support and makes the deployment of upgrades much easier.

Controlled information
Business data is a crucial component in maintaining competitive advantage, but distributed computing can make this data more difficult to access. Consolidation helps structure large amounts of data, improving access and helping

Why we are different

Focus on appropriate solution
Computacenter delivers the right solution for consolidation. In many circumstances this requires no investment in infrastructure, and instead driving better use of existing assets.

Track record
Computacenter has a considerable track record in delivering consolidation projects. In areas such as physical consolidation, over 30,000 business critical assets have been transformed since 2000.

Heterogeneous breadth and depth of skills
Our experience and skills investment mean we can implement migration projects at lower cost, with less risk and more quickly than our competitors. Computacenter has consultants accredited to the highest level with all major datacenter vendors such as IBM, SUN, Oracle, HP, Redhat, SuSE, Veritas, VMware, EMC, NetApp and HDS.

Whatever your requirements, we offer the resources and experience to help you design, build, test and manage IT infrastructures, integrating your new environment with your existing technology investment.

Where we have done it

BT
Computacenter's Windows Greenside Virtualisation project enabled BT to achieve a server consolidation ratio of 15 to 1. With around 1,400 fewer servers to power and cool, the company has been able to cut its energy bill.

BT has saved a further £750,000 per year on datacenter floor space costs and has also dramatically reduced its IT managed services bill by almost £800,000 per annum.

The project – which paid for itself in just eight months – means BT now has more datacenter capacity for both internal IT programmes and new customer engagements.