Server consolidation

When the cabling in the machine room becomes unintelligible, the monitoring of individual servers becomes more and more complicated, and the energy consumption becomes untraceable, the concept of server consolidation comes to the rescue.

The ever-increasing server demand of companies necessitates the operation of more and more energy- and space-demanding servers. For reasons of economy and rationalization, it would be advisable to replace the traditional RACK servers with some more efficient solution, where the servers can be operated even more efficiently in an even smaller space with the same computing power, but with much lower energy consumption.

The essence of server consolidation is to remove cooling, power supply, remote monitoring (management) from the server and solve these tasks centrally for a group of servers, thus only the CPU, RAM and components responsible for the data connection remain in the servers, which do not contain large mechanical parts , so these servers can be further reduced and integrated. An example of such an integration solution is LENOVO Flex technology.

The efficiency of server consolidation can be further increased if it is implemented together with a storage consolidation. IBM offers two main sets of solutions for this. One of them is the IBM Blade S frame available for small companies, which, in addition to servers, also provides centralized storage capacity within a frame. For medium and large companies, a central storage solution from IBM can make consolidation even more effective.

As an example, let us assume that we need 14 new servers. Each server requires 2 ethernet ports for redundant access to server services, 2 ethernet ports for redundant management, 2 FC ports for redundant central storage access, and last but not least, 2 power cables to ensure redundant power supply.

Based on quick addition and multiplication, the 14 servers are built from traditional 1U components and using LENOVO Flex technology, we get the following data
 

Blade center E chassis* with drawn


Blade center H chassis* with drawn