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SPONSORED REPORT ■
‘In a situation where everyone’s capital spend
and budgets are being squeezed, what
consolidation allows the customer to do is
reduce spend, cut their management costs
and manage a simpler data centre’
>>
Mark McKeon and Ciaran Hynes, HP
HP is a case in point. The technology giant is nearing fewest possible number of staff to run, says McKeon.
the end of a consolidation project that will cut its data “A lot of the companies are moving towards the idea of
centre count from 85 down to just six – a 14-fold reduc- lights-out data centres or low-touch data centres; they
tion. As a consequence of the rationalisation, it is want to get away from the days of people walking in
already claiming some impressive numbers – a 60pc and out of data centres, rebooting servers and chang-
reduction in energy costs, a 30pc reduction in server ing tapes. They want to minimise the amount of
numbers and yet an 80pc increase in processing power. change and the amount of human intervention, thereby
The net effect has been to reduce HP’s spending on in theory minimising outages and issues relating to
IT from 4pc to just 2pc of revenues – a cool US$2bn in change.”
annual savings. In conclusion, McKeon notes that while data centre
But reducing the number of facilities is just part of consolidation may be a project associated with larger
the story. Consolidation also involves using innovative organisations, such projects can benefit smaller busi-
technologies such as blade servers/blade chassis and nesses too.
virtualisation to ensure equipment such as servers and “There is a prize in every business, even smaller
storage systems are deployed much more efficiently. ones. We would say that blade server technology and
There is also a move to embrace newer, greener virtualisation can deliver savings to all customers. If
technologies such as low-power processors and natural you’re a small company running 20 racked servers you
cooling systems to take a few noughts off the annual can run them in one blade enclosure, which is going to
power bill. absolutely decrease your server footprint, with all the
The final piece of the consolidation jigsaw is design- benefits that brings in terms of decreased space and
ing data centres in such a way that they require the power usage.”
September 2008 Knowledge Ireland 63
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