Infrastructure consolidation presents an excellent opportunity for application consolidation. By consolidating (or rationalising for want of a better word) applications, significant savings can be made in terms of software license costs and in operational management and support efficiencies. This can be achieved by mixed workload consolidation, application instance rationalisation, or legacy application encapsulation.
Workload Consolidation
Once powerful server technology has been introduced as a service platform then mixed workload consolidation is a very real possibility. Mixed workload consolidation is basically the practice of running multiple heterogeneous applications simultaneously on a single hardware platform. This can be achieved by either re-engineering applications to run under a single instance of an open operating system such as Linux, or more commonly by reducing the number of instances of an application running on a common operating system platform and hosting them alongside other rationalised application platforms of a heterogeneous nature under the control of a virtualisation hypervisor that is hardware and operating system agnostic.
Instance Rationalisation
Application instance rationalisation is exactly as it suggests. More powerful hardware means many more clients can be serviced from a single platform. This means what might have been running on thirty application servers can now run on one. SQL and Exchange are good examples. The service they provide is identical whether there are multiple instances or one. Providing application performance and scalability can be assured then application instance rationalisation can take place.
Encapsulation
Legacy application encapsulation is probably the most quickly adopted application consolidation practice once a virtualised computing platform has been introduced. Many organisations retain legacy applications for compliance purposes. In most cases these applications are never used but are required to be kept available just in case. These applications reside on hardware that consumes power, cooling, network ports, and has an associated support, maintenance, and operational management cost - hardware that is by its nature is old and unreliable. They are a liability.
These applications and their platforms can be virtualised and encapsulated into file format. This removes the need for physical systems and therefore reduces cost and risk, and releases valuable datacentre real estate. Once virtualised, they can be placed into a lifecycle management system that is compliant with business demands, and systematically retired by means of Automation.
We Do It
Needless to say, WE DO IT. We have all the expertise to take your physical consolidation to the next level – the logical consolidation of applications. This further optimises your infrastructure and delivers greater efficiencies to your business customers, making you more agile and valuable as an IT organisation to them.
