NT spoils consolidation

The limitations of NT will delay many server consolidation projects for at least three years according to research by the Meta Group.

Almost three quarters of western European companies are planning to consolidate their server functions in the next few years, in order to cut management cost and complexity.

But, of the 15 per cent of companies which have attempted differing levels of integration - ranging from physical co-location of servers to application and storage sharing - half have failed. Andreas Zilch, a consultant at Meta, said that most of these failures were caused by business rather than technical problems, but he insisted that Unix users were further ahead than NT users.

"Unix is ready for 'like workload' administration and application and storage sharing, whereas it will be at least three years before NT gets past the file and print stage," he said.

Zilch noted that companies are turning to consolidation because they regret having set up distributed departmental intranets, which made administration impossible.

Although consolidation should bring network management back to the IT department, Zilch claimed that a failure to include business departments in the decision making had caused most projects to fail.

Even though companies unwisely tend to concentrate more on the technology than the business process, there is still a tendency to underestimate the effect on the network workload, especially with two-tier architectures," he warned.

Step by step

Levels of server consolidation:

- Distributed departmental servers - the most inefficient

- Physical co-location of servers, storage and staff

- Centralised file and print

- Like workload consolidation

- shared storage and applications

- integrating DB, storage and server administration

- Mixed workload consolidation

- Very complex but makes most efficient use of resources.