consolidation -what's it all about?

The last decade has seen a proliferation of servers within organisational data centres and IT Departments. This proliferation has seen an increase in not only the number of servers, but also the variety of applications hosted on these servers. Each of these servers represents both an investment in terms of capital expenditure, and a potential point of failure of a critical system.

Consolidation represents the recent trend towards bringing the physical hosting of these servers back into fewer, more fault tolerant devices. This process has, in the past, been seen as the preserve of larger organisations operating large data centres. More recently, emerging technologies have made the benefits of consolidation accessible to small to medium sized organisations, operating perhaps 30 or less servers.