Server Consolidation

The trend of replacing many server systems with fewer, more powerful systems is gaining ground. You see it happening in most large enterprises, in TV advertisements and throughout the technology trade media. The reasons for consolidating servers are obvious: 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 compelling "less is more" solution.

A less-recognized development is that Lotus applications, such as Notes and Domino, are particularly well adapted to these new server environments. That's because some of the requirements of a consolidated server environment play precisely to the designed-in strengths of Lotus. Here's why.

Server consolidation means fewer servers - this is the essential benefit. When there are fewer servers more users are further away from their server or servers. In such an environment it's highly likely that more users will work offline and synch up later, work at remote sites, or even be come remote sites. This means that each time they do work that changes a database (which is almost all work) one of two things happens: they work on a database in real-time, which could be bandwidth-constrained, or they work locally, which means the database is updated through an automatic replication function. The second scenario makes more efficient use of bandwidth resources and is the way in which all Lotus collaboration products are designed.

Lotus applications are designed to perform frequent replications to ensure that all databases are secure and up-to-date. Frequent replications are a strong benefit in consolidated server environments. Users can perform their work quickly, databases get updated automatically and frequently and all the while bandwidth is used with maximum efficiency. What is the end result of all this? Server consolidation generally requires more replications and Lotus applications are designed from the start to satisfy that requirement efficiently and transparently.

So, generally, if  you chose Lotus applications for productivity and collaboration, you may not have realized it at the time, but you've made the perfect choice of enterprise applications for a consolidated server environment.  But it's not a perfect world and you may need some tools to make sure that your Lotus applications provide the greatest possible efficiency as you consolidate servers. Even with frequent replications, your Lotus applications could bog down as thousands of users work further away from their servers than they did before. And those replications will eat up valuable bandwidth.

The TurboGold solution speeds up Lotus performance while reducing bandwidth costs. Through the combination of compression, data streaming and caching technology TurboGold works in consolidated server environments to speed up performance for any type of file a Lotus user is likely to need.

When you're considering a tool to accelerate Lotus performance it's important that you consider the places where the problem occurs. You must accelerate the replications inherent in both server-to-server and client-to-server interactions. There are products available that address one or the other. To have a full solution, it's advisable to work both sources of the problem.

What kind of improvements can you expect from TurboGold? IBM, with more than 100,000 Lotus users using TurboGold, has sped up their Lotus performance by a factor of 2. American General Finance improved replication performance by 12-to-1 in a network that makes extensive use of satellites. At Hydrite Chemical, 60 field agents were each updating 30 databases per day, which was taking from three to four hours. By implementing TurboGold this dropped to less than 30 minutes.

SPX Global Information Services - a $5billion international company - consolidated their servers down from 44 Windows NT - based Domino servers to two IBM iSeries AS/400 Domino servers. SPX realized tremendous savings and efficiencies through this consolidation, but the company would have expected an increase in bandwidth costs because the consolidation greatly increased the number of remote users. This didn't happen, though, because SPX implemented TurboGold. Bandwidth costs actually decreased. SPX realized both the tremendous ROI of consolidating servers and cut bandwidth costs at the same time.

This means that in daily online work, server consolidation can save companies significant expenses by reducing bandwidth costs along with system management and maintenance. If your enterprise had the foresight to choose Lotus enterprise applications, you already have ahead start on realizing the benefits of server consolidation. And if you install TurboGold, you can make slow performance much faster and good performance is great for a low initial investment with a fast payback.

Server Consolidation - A Real World Example