The need for IT consolidation

In the consolidation phase, organizations are focused on reducing costs related to their IT infrastructure by promoting greater coordination and resource sharing within the data center. Unifying data center platforms and networks enables the organization to maximize the efficiency benefits of consolidation, while also making it easier to ensure the architecture continues to support compliance and secure multi-tenancy as workloads on virtual machines travel across data centers.

Existing data center architectures were built before virtualization, and are typically siloed in functionality. They were designed for individual applications. Consequently, they are characterized by multiple platforms running multiple operating systems, by large capital expenditures due to poor system utilization (because resources are isolated and unshared), and by highly inefficient power and cooling and complex management requirements.

One of the first steps toward more efficient data center architecture is to consolidate and simplify. A successful consolidation strategy should focus on creating a unified foundation for LAN and SAN network traffic, a unified operating environment for computing and network services (such as firewall, load-balancing, intrusion detection), and encompass wide area application services for consolidating branch servers and storage. Consolidation of these aspects can enable high utilization, dynamic management, and a reduced footprint.

Over time, convergence of data and communications into a single network helped improve network efficiency. Now, the capacity of 10-gigabit Ethernet, with eventual expansion to 40- and 100-gigabit, allows organizations to also converge the LAN and SAN traffic onto a unified data center fabric, helping to prepare for a consolidated private cloud architecture in which shared network services, supported by cross-functional staff, are the standard. This efficient, simplified, and shared architecture can better handle future applications.

In traditional environments, it was easy to ensure the separation of crucial applications and data to satisfy customer requirements and compliance rules, because they resided on separate servers. In a unified data center designed for resource sharing, you will need to ensure that your network has the intelligence and capability to associate unique security and quality of service (QoS) requirements, and other policies, with individual virtual machines, whether you are virtualizing applications on the same physical server or across multiple data centers.