Essay About New Servers And Growing Server Sprawl

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Computing Challenges Today
To meet the constant demand to deploy, maintain and grow
a broad array of services and applications, , IT organizations
must continually add new servers. However, as a consequence
of purchasing more and more servers, organizations
face a growing server sprawl presenting challenges that
include:
• Rising costs. In addition to the expense of adding new
servers, organizations face the added costs associated
with increasing hardware—rising costs for power, cooling,
network infrastructure, storage infrastructure, server administration,
data center upgrades and new data centers.
• Poor return on investment. The common practice of dedicating
a single server to each x86 application and sizing it
for peak loads has led to severe underutilization of server
assets in most data centers. IDC estimates that there is currently
more than $140 billion in server overcapacity, or a
three-year supply of server capacity.2 While servers typically
run at 5-15% CPU utilization, traditional business process
and technology limitations make it difficult to improve
these utilization rates.
• Decreasing manageability. Managing servers becomes
increasingly difficult as the number of servers grows and
the number of applications continue to multiply. Adding
to that challenge is the heterogeneous mix of hardware,
server models, operating systems and configurations that IT
departments need to support.
• Reduced efficiency. As server sprawl increases, IT organizations
are forced to spend more time on reactive tasks
such as server provisioning, configuration, monitoring