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The amount of power use in data centers in the United States was the equivalent of five 1,000 MW power plants, according to a 2005 study commissioned by AMD. The average size of a power plant is 213 MW.

Higher energy consumption will lead to power failures. According to a Data Center Institute report, more than 20 percent of AFCOM members reported experiencing five or more outages in the last five years.

Server Consolidation As companies continue to look at server consolidation as a step toward reducing energy costs, they need to keep these challenges in mind:

• Determine technology approaches
• Identify areas of low utilization and opportunities for high ROI
• Identify consolidation candidates
• Ensure application performance is maintained after consolidation
• Develop a business case for consolidation that is supported by the business
• Reduce risk and maximize results

In practice, according to a May 2006 Forrester report, Windows servers typically run at only 8-12 percent of their full capacity, and UNIX servers at only 25-30 percent.

The Ongoing Process
Recognizing that consolidation is an ongoing process is the first step. The proper performance management software and automated reporting can provide the feedback needed to continue to provision successfully into your consolidated environment. This will ensure that your initial consolidation effort continues to deliver the desired ROI as you grow the business.

Experiment with different configurations to see how applications will perform in a shared environment. Use this information to determine the optimal server configurations to support your multi-tiered workloads.

You can also model and validate your consolidation plan to evaluate whether your objectives were met in the areas of overall system activity, system activity by workload, process data, disk activity and network and TCP statistics.

T-Systems Case study
T-Systems, one of Europe’s leading providers of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), deployed TeamQuest software on 320 systems after a 3-day training workshop.

Using TeamQuest software, T-Systems was able to consolidate servers and achieve a reduction of more than 25 percent in CPU and memory resources, improve business processes, and increase productivity.