Data Centre Management, Julian Payne, head of data products, Cable & Wireless looks at consolidation.
Today’s multinational organisations are looking to reduce costs in the face of a toughening economic environment and rapidly increasing energy costs. Gartner recently issued a stark statement which highlights the scale of the challenge “power hungry hardware and rising fuel prices could lead to energy costs eating up more than one third of IT budgets within the next 5 years”.

Where are we going?
The premise of server consolidation is that often on-site servers are only using 20% capacity and are consuming as much as 80% of the power that a server running at full capacity would require. Large distributed server estates are costly and inefficient. By consolidating server processing tasks at a centrally located site, hardware can be run at capacity. Also, the number of maintenance engineers can be reduced – not to mention the amount of travelling engineers have to do between sites.
A typical 100 site network of branch locations would need two servers per site to deliver service to employees. This in turn would need eight field engineers – each being able to support around 25 servers per annum at a cost of £50,000 in salary per engineer. The total cost would be 8 x £50,000 or £400,000 per annum.

If the estate can be consolidated to just two centralised locations the maintenance cost could be cut to just two engineers or £100,000 per annum.

The enabler
This concept hasn’t always been possible. Commercially the cost of bandwidth required to link such centralised sites has been prohibitively high. In addition, networks have been difficult to scale and visibility into application usage (e.g. how much bandwidth each application is using) has been hard to determine. However, we are now benefiting from the launch of next generation networks, which not only offer higher speeds for data centre sites (up to 10GB/S over Ethernet) but also allow for a different economic model. As a rough guide, the Cable&Wireless Multi-service platform (MSP) -our next generation network - can provide four times the bandwidth of a traditional leased-line, at a reduced total cost of ownership when compared to a legacy solution.

The process in action:
One of Cable&Wireless’ largest multinational customers has recently been undertaking a consolidation project. The large technology company had made several acquisitions over recent years that had left it with 85 major server sites throughout Europe, Africa and the U.S. By delivering connections of 1GB/S over Ethernet to primary sites, the company could guarantee the performance of its strategic data centres and cope with increased capacity at these locations. Newly acquired data centres could be re-located to more easy to maintain locations with a lower cost of ownership. The company was also able to consolidate in such a manner as to remove excess capacity from its operations, increasing its green credentials and cutting energy costs. The 85 sites have now been rationalised to just six and the organisation is able to deliver advanced centrally hosted applications, such as IP video conferencing, to its workforce worldwide. 

The next generation
Next generation networks have been talked about for the last 10 years but the industry has now reached a tipping point and companies are keen to discover new ways of working and new ways to streamline operations by leveraging wide area networks. Data centre consolidation is just one of the projects companies are pursuing. In other circumstances it’s the applications themselves and the new ways of working they provide which are driving uptake. Take, for example, the delivery of global ERP systems, digital signage or IPCCTV which can all improve productivity, cut costs and, in some cases, open new revenue streams. Amongst these new developments using next generation networks to underpin data centre consolidation will provide powerful benefits, return on investment and can even reduce current telecoms outgoings.