Article

Server Consolidation: A Real World Example
by Dan Burger
March 21, 2002

You hear a lot about server consolidation these days. The iSeries team at IBM shines a light on it every chance it gets. At the town hall meeting during the recent COMMON conference, and as the highlight of a recent iSeries Nation chat, IBM played the server consolidation card with great fanfare and persistent praise.

One example of how server consolidation works in the real world is with a fast-growing company called SPX. To reduce the amount of administration and to manage its rapid growth more efficiently, SPX switched from a decentralized model of 44 Windows NT-based Lotus Domino servers to a centralized model featuring two iSeries Dedicated Servers for Domino.

SPX, of Muskegon, Michigan, is a global provider of technical products with operations in 34 countries. Its products include storage networking solutions, safety equipment, broadcast antennas and towers, life science equipment, diagnostic systems, and technical information services. SPX has acquired more than 40 companies in the past three years, including one that doubled the size of the company. In four years, the company's annual revenue has increased from $1 billion a year to $5 billion a year.

Pete Sattler, the chief information officer of SPX, explained that the rapid pace of acquisitions had left the company with nine different e-mail systems. Three years ago, a decision was reached to consolidate on a standard mail platform, IBM Lotus Notes. In order to support the Notes environment throughout the far-flung corporation, SPX used 45 NT servers.

As SPX acquired bigger companies with larger numbers of employees, the prospect of building a huge server farm with its prerequisite staff seemed likely. So SPX began examining the opportunities that came with consolidating servers and changing from Windows to the OS/400 platform.

"If we had deployed a similar architecture (as was used when Lotus Notes was first adopted), the number of servers would have been doubled and the support staff would have doubled, too," Sattler said. "Growing the server farm meant a huge investment in upfront hardware. It would be costly, complex to support, and it would make it difficult to keep up with newest releases of Notes." No additional IT staff members were added, although Sattler points out that the overall organization had grown to twice its original size.

For "a fraction of cost" Sattler was able to eliminate the 45 servers in the field, plus the incremental 45 servers necessary to maintain pace with company growth. What could have been running on 90 NT servers was consolidated onto two eServer i820 dedicated Domino boxes. The two units are clustered for 100 percent failover redundancy.

Seems logical. "Logic rules in my world," Sattler said.

However, all is not perfect in the server consolidation world. The decision-makers at any given company may stop thinking after calculating the savings they realized by not buying all those NT servers and hiring all those people to watch over them. Have you ever had a project designed to eliminate one bottleneck, only to find another has taken its place?

In most server consolidation strategies, the consolidation will result in users who are across WAN links and therefore not local. In the case of SPX, there were typically 200 to 500 users per NT server, and those servers were dispersed across the WAN and had many different topologies. Take away the local server, and communications slow down. Any user who opens an application online--such as e-mail--will burn up CPU cycles on the server. That usually results in grouchy users. What do you do to combat this?

Replication is one way. It's also the Lotus way. Lotus applications are designed to perform frequent replications so all databases are up to date. Frequent replications are a key benefit in consolidated server environments. They allow more users to work offline, with the database updated through automatic replication. People working offline allows for a more efficient use of bandwidth resources, but replication diminishes bandwidth, and more bandwidth means increased telecommunications costs.

To battle the bandwidth dragon, companies--SPX included--can turn to software-based acceleration products that speed up Lotus performance and reduce bandwidth costs. Through the combination of caching, data streaming, and compression, this type of accelerator works in consolidated server environments to speed up performance for any type of file a Lotus user is likely to need.

One such product is TurboGold, by Stampede Technologies. "We purchased TurboGold for our entire global infrastructure, including both AS/400 Domino servers and 12,000 clients," said SPX's Sattler. "To date, we have experienced compression savings that will allow us to significantly reduce our bandwidth requirements and speed up replication for our mobile workforce."

The biggest obstacle in the SPX server consolidation project was the question of bandwidth. The WAN links were "fairly expensive" in some cases, Sattler said. But by using TurboGold, and compressing the e-mail two to three times, SPX significantly reduced its WAN investment to support the operation and minimized the incremental bandwidth that was needed to support the environment. "We analyzed, before the consolidation, whether the increased bandwidth cost would be offset by the lower administration and investment cost for the distributed architecture," Sattler said.

The acceleration software extends the life of the infrastructure. In other words, it allows the current investment in the WAN to be used longer without upgrades. "Otherwise,” Sattler said, "we would have had to purchase new routers, expand the WAN links, and increase the size of 'pipes.'"

"The reasons for consolidating servers are obvious," says Gordon L. Dorworth, president and CEO of Stampede Technologies. "Organizations can realize as much or more computing power, while reducing their system maintenance and management costs. With powerful new multiprocessor systems and shrinking prices, server consolidation provides a 'less is more' solution that is compelling."