Server Consolidation Yields More Than Just Cost Savings for Growing Australian City

Business Challenge

Brisbane, the center of Australia’s fastest growing region, is a city that looks to the future. To prepare for the changes that lie ahead, the Brisbane City Council has developed a vision for the city:"Living in Brisbane 2010." This vision calls for enhancing the quality of life in Brisbane, building vibrant communities and improving the quality and value of city services.

Likewise, the Council’s IT group, called the iDivision, saw the need to develop its own plan to support the region’s growth. Its existing computer infrastructure was expensive and inefficient. To support the city’s increasing needs, iDivision added ever more applications and servers to its data center, following a one application-per-server approach to ensure reliable operations. "We tried to consolidate applications, but only a few applications could reliably share a server. And even those could become problematic over time as we added patches and made upgrades," says Bill Croucher, iDivision Delivery Director. "To avoid software reliability problems, we were tied to our old, expensive approach."

By late 2002, the iDivision had 85 small- to medium-sized Intel® architecture–based servers running Microsoft Windows NT. These servers supported many types of applications that ranged from job tracking and time management to large applications such as procurement. Microsoft SQLServer supported the database applications, while Citrix Metaframe* provided low-bandwidth access to applications for regional sites.

Server proliferation, driven by the increased demand and growth of smaller applications, had several significant consequences. The large number of servers was expensive to manage. In addition, scalability often required that servers be moved and replaced, which is both disruptive and costly. Finally, with CPU utilizations averaging only 5 percent to 8 percent, capital equipment costs were high compared to the value provided.

The iDivision knew it was essential to reduce costs and complexity, but it also needed low-cost development and test environments for internal customers. "We billed customers for the costs of both development and production servers, but they really wanted to pay for production costs only. Because development environments were virtually nonexistent, we did sociability testing and managed upgrades on live systems, which was not only disruptive but also increased our administrative workload and risk."

Concluding that server proliferation and the lack of cost-effective test systems would only become more problematic as the Brisbane region grew, the iDivision determined it was time to consolidate its servers. Since the iDivision considers all of its applications critical, the IT staff approached organizations with proven experience in server consolidation.

The Council selected Intel® Solution Services to help with the project because of the organization’s independence from any specific hardware or software vendor. In addition, Intel Solution Services has a server consolidation specialty practice with extensive worldwide experience.