Server Proliferation Leads to Complexity and Potential High Costs for Gap Inc.
Gap Inc. commands the retail apparel industry. Its 4,300 Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic stores make it by far the largest fashion retailer anywhere and a household name around the world.

That kind of economic might does not come without serious computing power on the back end, but managing that power came at a price. Lisa Centoni, director of Gap’s Intel Server Systems group, says, “For years, every time we added a new project, we added a server to accommodate it. Application vendors specified the server configuration, and we installed and supported them.�?

Gap’s Intel Server Systems group now manages some 450 Intel® architecture-based servers, and because of the old one-application-per-server approach, average system utilization stood at less than 10 percent for more than 300 of the servers. Now, says Centoni, Gap is “paying the price of server proliferation, which includes low utilization and increased support complexity. We had a feeling that system utilization should be higher—perhaps an average of 40 to 50 percent utilization. The question was how to get there.�?

With increasingly aggressive business requirements and a continuously growing number of projects, Gap’s IT staff was busy with new initiatives. But then in 2003, many of Gap’s servers were coming off warranty coverage. Maintenance costs were set to more than double through extended warranty purchases. That became the impetus to evaluate server consolidation.

Intel Solution Services Brings Experience and a Proven Methodology

Based on Intel’s central position in the server industry as well as its neutrality toward server vendors, Gap collaborated with Intel® Solution Services to evaluate alternatives and define how to consolidate servers. Intel Solution Services approached the project with a proven and repeatable methodology that included the following three focus areas:

1. Business and Technical Assessment: Intel Solution Services assessed Gap’s business requirements along with information about its IT strategy and architecture. The Intel consultants documented current server configurations and measured current system utilization and other performance metrics.
2. Analysis and Economic Analysis: Intel Solution Services’ consultants characterized Gap’s workloads and performed simulations to evaluate alternative designs to achieve the best consolidation ratio for the data center. The modeling work was performed on Intel® Xeon™ processor-based servers at an Intel® Solution Center. The Intel Solution Centers are state-of-the-art facilities for designing and testing high-performance solutions using Intel best-known methods and technologies. After visiting the facility and meeting with expert staff members, Centoni was extremely impressed. “Why would we ever try to replicate this kind of environment on our own? We were amazed at the flexibility, the skilled and talented people at our disposal, and the wide range of hardware we could put our hands on to test and evaluate.�? Intel Solution Services recommended Gap start by consolidating up to one-third of its existing servers with just three 8-way IBM eServer xSeries* 440 servers employing virtualization software from VMware. IBM hardware was chosen due to its tight integration and optimization with VMware. Using three Intel® Xeon™ processor MP-based servers would provide an amazing consolidation ratio of up to 30:1, resulting in a significant reduction in complexity along with unprecedented cost savings. In addition, the consolidated servers would be configured for high availability, with the potential to boost uptime to greater than 99.99 percent.

   Then Intel Solution Services provided a detailed TCO and ROI analysis to show the overwhelmingly positive impact of the new design. ROI was projected to improve by more than 43 percent over the next two years.