I.T. Lesson for General Management

In this Network World article, IBM reintroduces the oldest I.T. cost containment trick in the book - consolidation.

By collapsing literally thousands of servers onto a dozen or so mainframes, they are planning on saving hundreds of millions of dollars. They'll also improve manageability, security, energy and capital costs by eliminating all those redundantly powered, air conditioned data centers.

In a former life, my team was able to do the same thing - eliminating six data centers and collapsing all our applications onto a single set of (iSeries) servers. The (internal I.T.) results were dramatic. Instead of six AS400 administrators, I needed only one (and a backup). PTF (Operating systems patches) maintenance became simple and straightforward. Management of the machines became predictable. Capacity planning and performance tuning was simplified. We were able to highly train the iSeries administrators, so they became experts.

If you are a small to mid sized business, ask your I.T. folks to take a look at how many servers you have and where they're located. Chances are, you'll discover an opportunity to simplify your infrastructure and reduce your costs and improve systems management, through co-location and consolidation.