Multiple and redundant racks or sometimes even data centres are common in many organisations. A small margin of redundancy aids disaster recovery and business continuity but organisations need to consider the significant cost involved in maintaining this additional infrastructure which, in most cases, is unnecessary.
So what exactly is Data Centre Consolidation?
Data centre consolidation is a process that uses efficient technologies to merge and reduce the IT assets of an organisation, It involves consolidation of both hardware infrastructure, software and public or private cloud infrastructure.
Hardware-based consolidation focuses on using intelligent switches, storage virtualisation, blade chassis and rack management while software-based consolidation includes switching to a single management console to manage several different platforms, server virtualisation, cloud computing and automation.