54 IBM ^ xSeries 440 Planning and Installation Guide
With its Enterprise X-Architecture enabled features, the x440 server offers
flexibility, availability, and scalability to handle customer requirements for
consolidating distributed workloads onto a single powerful and highly
available platform to achieve total cost of ownership (TCO) savings.
–Reducing the number of servers by replacing many small servers
with fewer large servers
Physical consolidation may be implemented on a site, department, or
enterprise basis. For example, many x220 file/print servers can be
consolidated onto newer, much faster, more reliable x440 servers, or older
servers with high hardware maintenance costs can be consolidated or
replaced by newer, much faster, cheaper-to-maintain x440 servers.
–Physical server consolidation
The number of separate hardware platforms and operating system
instances within a consolidation site may vary considerably by customer.
Typically, some reduction in the number of distinct servers is
accomplished when gathering distributed systems into a central
installation or when a number of small servers are replaced with larger
servers of the same platform. Based on the enterpri se’s platform, four
physical server consolidation cases can be considered.
•Case 1: Small servers from one platform to server(s) on the same
platform
•Case 2: Small servers from different platforms to servers on different
platforms (platform source and target are the same)
•Case 3: Small servers from one platform to server(s) on a different
platform
•Case 4: Small servers from different platforms to server(s) on a
different platform (platforms’ source and target are not the same)
Cases 1 and 2 are physical server consolidation, and there is no lo gical
work to do. For cases 3 and 4, a platform migration has to be planned, and
applications and data have to be ported from one platform to another. The
objective of the physical server consolidation phase is not to share
applications or data but to have an application that was running on one
platform run on a new platform. Therefore, this operation has to be
differentiated from application or data integration.
Physical consolidation can be divided into two subcategories, namely
server consolidation and storage consolidation.
This can take place within the same architecture -- for example, several
two-way servers replaced with one 16-way x440 server or many
uniprocessor servers moving to several multiprocessor x440 servers.