Rather than maintaining a direct-attached storage and server environment where there is a one-to-one relationship between each server and its disk subsystem, companies are realizing the advantages of pooling and consolidation their storage and server resources.

Virtualization has changed the playing field for organizations all over the globe. Having the ability to consolidate servers and storage systems leads to greater cost and energy efficiency, as well as open up hosting or colocation opportunities for mission-critical applications.

Entrepid is uniquely positioned to deliver consolidation and virtualization for IBM i environments on Power Systems, Blades and Pure Flex, supporting PowerHA, Live Partition Mobility and VIOS/PowerVM.

The benefits can be substantial:

• Reduces costs for delivering services
• Improves scalability for prompt reaction to changing/growing business needs
• Offers greater availability of resources and services
• Provides access to data residing in legacy systems
• Opens up continuous availability, capacity on demand, and faster response times
• Increases productivity, with administrators able to efficiently manage more applications
• Optimizes archiving and backup/restore processes and performance
• Increases floor space utilization
• Enhances security of data
• Reduces business risk

Storage Consolidation

As your company grows, traditional direct-attached storage architectures can become increasingly expensive to manage and maintain. Storage consolidation centralizes and shares storage resources among numerous application servers. It also solves the growing data demands generated by information-rich business environments while also providing a natural transition to virtual and cloud environments.

Entrepid’s storage consolidation services can help your company make the most efficient use of its existing data storage infrastructure, or help you select, design, and implement a new storage architecture.

The benefits of storage consolidation include:

• Centralized access of storage resources
• Improved management of higher capacity per storage administrator (10 to 20 times as high as direct-attached in some cases)
• Storage investment spread across multiple servers
• High-capacity utilization
• Reduced administration costs
• Meeting quality of service (QoS) requirements, including capacity, performance, and availability

Server Consolidation

Server consolidation requires a complex combination of skills for analysis, architecture, design, implementation, and support. Entrepid can ensure that your existing applications are consolidated on more powerful, cost-effective servers such as the IBM i Power Systems. Overall, we can help you achieve your goal of optimizing and simplifying your existing IT infrastructure.

Entrepid’s Server Consolidation Approach

A server consolidation strategy will be developed in several stages, including:

• Centralization within physical location
• Physical consolidation, where the actual number of servers is reduced by replacing several smaller servers with fewer larger servers
• Data integration, where data is more centrally managed and controlled to create greater economies of scale and allow storage to be managed as an enterprise resource
• Application integration, which entails migrating an application and/or data to a new platform in order to co-locate the application and data