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An initial impetus for consolidating backup and recovery typically is cost. Maintaining separate backup and recovery systems on different platforms can be an expensive and time-consuming burden. Solutions requiring minimal operator intervention and low services overhead can expedite deployment and ease ongoing operation. For that reason, many organizations take advantage of server consolidation to deploy an integrated, robust solution that is ideally suited for the Linux environment and works well with other enterprise applications and databases.

Maximizing Server Consolidation ROI
In the final analysis, improvements in data management are the acid test of any server consolidation. To get as much value as possible out of the migration, cost savings, and process improvements should be weighed against capital expenditures over a six-to-eight month period. For example, tallying the savings from migrating 20 servers that are 10 percent utilized to one-to-five servers with more than 50 percent utilization each can be measured in terms of equipment expenses, administrative labor costs, and software license fees.

Another important metric involves comparing data management costs against overall data growth. "If the cost of managing and protecting your data is growing more or less commensurate with the increase in data or addition of new servers, you are spending too much and should look to consolidation and centralized backup and recovery to reduce the expense," summarizes Karp.

Of course, calculating the advantages and value of migrating low-capacity servers to a more robust platform will depend upon pressing business priorities and core competencies. For organizations in the mid-market, however, the success of any consolidation project will be driven by the adoption of best-of-class server as well as backup and recovery solutions that are designed to contain costs, increase security, and protect data integrity while simplifying management and improving resource utilization.

According to IBM's Gordon, many small-to-medium businesses can quantify and qualify return on investment in most server consolidations by factoring improvements in manageability and reliability as well as backup and recovery. "All things considered, most consolidations involving 10 or more servers pay for themselves within a year," he concludes. "When you replace 20 low-capacity servers with one high-performance system that is much easier to manage and protect, it's pretty straightforward to extrapolate all the advantages."

BakBone Software
More than a year ago, BakBone Software announced that its NetVault backup and recovery software supported all IBM eServer pSeries systems running 64-bit Linux on IBM's Power Architecture processors. The blend of BakBone's data protection experience with IBM's Linux on Power technology is designed to reduce costs, consolidate workloads, and integrate on-demand computing environments without sacrificing robust data protection.

Adding NetVault's advanced capabilities to the mix, such as virtual disk library (VDL) support, speeds both backup and restore efforts using fast disk-to-disk capabilities. One of the major benefits of BakBone's NetVault VDL is the ability to run multiple jobs at once to a disk, which eliminates the need for more costly tape drives or libraries. Using NetVault's built-in policy management allows IT managers to set policies that automate moving this data from the VDL to tape as well as dictating how long the data should reside on the VDL and/or tape. The addition of this near-line recovery option bolsters disaster recovery while providing a smoother transition to offsite, longer-term data archival as needed.

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