consolidation - business needs addressed

Typically, consolidation addresses business needs surrounding total cost of ownership and high availability. IT managers are being placed under increasing pressure to introduce efficiencies into both their own departments, and to the wider organisation. Consolidation addresses these pressures in the following areas:

inefficient use of hardware

An average server will operate at approximately 20% to 30% efficiency in terms of the utilisation of its memory and processors. This is due to the fact that servers are typically sized for both anticipated future growth, and to allow for operation during load periods. When this low efficiency is multiplied across five, ten, twenty or more servers; it's easy to see how the cost of this built-in redundancy can directly affect the cost of a running a business.

inflexibility or expense of implementing DR and HA

When individual physical servers are deployed, the provision of Disaster Recovery (DR) and High Availability (HA) facilities requires the provision of additional physical servers, usually located at a remote DR site. This strategy will often incorporate expensive replication or clustering software to provide the HA element of an organisation's IT strategy.