An IT system renovation process in which the number of physical active servers used by a business is reduced to more efficiently use under-utilized servers, simplify system complexity and save on overhead maintenance costs. Also refers to the condensing of business-critical information and applications within a content network.
The main goal for an organization when implementing a data center consolidation solution is increasing the efficiency of its IT infrastructure. One of the main aspects taken into consideration during this process is server consolidation. By combining the processing duties of several under-utilized servers into a single, efficient unit, companies can decrease the number of total servers employed by their data centers, cut excess expenditure and the problem of server sprawl can be avoided. An efficiently running, consolidated data center can offer such benefits as increased network availability, business scalability and end-to-end performance monitoring. Along with reducing the number of active servers, companies may also choose to consolidate data centers by server virtualization. This process allows businesses to virtually layer a single server in order for it to perform the duties of several, serving business-critical information and applications to more users than previously possible.