Server Consolidation Hits the Data Center

If companies such as Aelita, Compaq, IBM, Sun, and SWsoft have their way, server consolidation will be high among the guiding principals in the corporate data center. The reason is simple, according to Gartner Inc., which is sponsoring a conference on the subject in December 2002: Doing More With Less.

Both IBM and SWsoft describe their systems as optimized for fair-sharing of network resources. "Say you have one server running one application or one software component, and you need to update it or it goes down or there's some sort of glitch," says Plant, "in the past you'd have to shut down the whole server or somehow take time to migrate all your applications and information onto another piece of hardware' -- decreasing system downtime and increasing performance."