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Master Plan Master Plan Phase I Evaluating OSS Solution Areas
| Evaluate OSS Workload Consolidation |
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OSS Workload Consolidation SolutionsIn light of today’s uncertain marketplace and extreme budgetary pressures at both the enterprise and IT levels, forward thinking agencies are starting to adopt a more open stance to proactive measures in streamlining their business and IT environments to achieve higher efficiencies and achieve better returns. The trend toward Workload Consolidation, simplification and increasing centralization is not new – it has been gaining momentum over the last several years as enterprises realize the cost savings and competitive advantage such efforts can yield. At its core, Server Consolidation is the “discipline” of simplifying and optimizing end-to-end IT infrastructures, including servers, databases, applications, networks, security and systems management capabilities with the goal of finding ways to better align the IT infrastructure to meet both current and future business goals. OSS Workload Consolidation BenefitsLower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Workload Consolidation can reap benefits in reducing the complexity in the IT infrastructure, establish better system management practices, optimize resource utilization and reduce hardware and software licensing fees. This can enable better management of IT functions, human and financial resources which helps in bringing down the cost of operation - making the existing infrastructure leaner, more efficient and less expensive. Streamlining the IT environment increase the return on an organization’s IT investment. Increase Resource utilization When inspected, most servers found in an agency’s IT environment are well below 50% utilized. This means that servers that an agency has procured are carrying a lot of spare capacity and investments are not fully realized. By performing workload consolidation, agencies hope to push up utilization on under-utilized servers and free up other servers to be redeployed or retired. Improved Service Levels A more efficient infrastructure is generally more effective. Workload Consolidation also enables the applications that drive the integrated enterprise to deliver increased data access, higher levels of availability, and faster response times to end users which would translate to operational savings to the agency. This happens because the IT resources are used in optimised way, with better management and with current updates to technologies used. Increased Security and Operational Resiliency Workload consolidation can increase the security of the overall system as there are fewer systems to be taken care off and they are better managed & monitored. With users demanding that any information about them be kept private, and new regulations being written to enforce privacy rights, data security is becoming a competitive necessity. OSS Workload Consolidation ComponentsHardware and Operating system layer During a workload consolidation exercise, applications would typically have to share a common operating system as they may need to co-exist within a single physical machine. One of the main challenges that organizations face in this situation is the porting of applications to a new operating system. Today, Linux (an OSS operating system) runs on the largest number of different hardware architectures making it an ideal choice for a common OS. Organizations whose applications are written for Linux would find it relatively easier to port them to various hardware architectures as long as Linux is able to run on those architectures. Where possible, organizations should strive to reduce the physical server footprints in order to decrease operational costs (attributed to floor space, air-conditioning, power, etc.). Ultra dense servers such as Blade centres and large servers capable of running multiple “virtual servers” address this issue. Virtualization layer Sometimes, it would not be possible to run multiple applications on a single operating system due to conflicts among the applications themselves. Therefore, virtualization software addresses this problem by giving servers the ability to create multiple instances of operating systems allowing organizations to run multiple “virtual servers” on a single physical server independent of each other as they would on separate physical servers. The virtualization layer acts as the interface between the hardware/OS and applications distributing the available compute resources to the multiple virtual servers either statically or dynamically based on requirements. Application layer During consolidation, it is sometimes beneficial to identify infrastructure type solutions such as Databases, Web servers, Mail servers, File & Print Servers, Directory Servers, Firewalls, etc. used by many different applications. Organizations should then seek to implement a common solution which would help to reduce licensing and maintenance costs. WORKLOAD CONSOLIDATION BENEFITS
WORKLOAD CONSOLIDATION COMPONENTS
WORKLOAD CONSOLIDATION SUCCESS FACTORS
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