Server Consolidation Project

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Project Contacts:
Dave Klein, Project Manager 459-1998
John Hammond 459-2598

• Purpose
• Scope
• Current Virtual Server list

General Overview

Increased automation, e-commerce, Web portals, and Internet traffic have contributed to a rapid growth of server infrastructure for many IT organizations. With this rapid growth organizations have accrued a portfolio of IT applications (and associated technology platforms) to address business imperatives. The result is a mix of disparate environments, server sprawl, and increased management overhead.

Despite the reduction in total cost of ownership and increase in performance that can be achieved by moving to a standardized operating environment, perceived higher costs and risks associated with migration have been preventing organizations from consolidation efforts.

Infrastructure optimization and server consolidation can help organizations to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and achieve greater availability, scalability, and value. An optimized and flexible infrastructure provides:

• Enhanced business productivity
• Improved performance, reliability, scalability and availability
• Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
• Better management of software licenses
• Reduced training costs

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to develop a state-of-the-art consolidated server infrastructure that will be used to provide a set of server hosting services to the UCSC campus. The goal of these services is to consolidate the support load of managing the many lightly loaded servers deployed around UCSC. This scalable infrastructure must provide for application level flexibility, quick deployment of applications, quick and easy redeployment of compute resources, high availability and redundancy, reduced administrative overhead and reduced overall cost.

The infrastructure will eventually be leveraged to deal with the currently unfulfilled demand for on-demand services for faculty and staff. These services may include Oracle, mysql, FileMaker and web servers with varying degrees of dynamic content.

Scope

The scope of this project is described in two phases:

Phase 1: Evaluation - Investigate various suppliers, products and architectures to develop a server and storage architecture that is optimal for providing server management services to the campus. These evaluation reports and recommendations will be presented to SMT for review and approval. COMPLETED

Phase 2: Deployment of initial capacity - purchase and install sufficient server and storage capacity to migrate Core Technology's Windows and Linux servers to the new environment. This phase also includes installing storage capacity for other CT servers. In addition to the migration of these servers, a detailed migration process will be documented to facilitate future server conversions to the virtual server environment.  COMPLETED

Project Documents

Project Charter (pdf), Version 1.2,

Evaluation Report, Version 0.3

UCCSC Presentation - "Virtual Slugs" 7/31/07

UC/CSU/CCC Sustainability Conference Slides (pdf), 2007

Current Virtual Servers (as of 3/1/07)