Server Consolidation at La-Z-Boy

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More and more companies these days are now consolidating their Wintel servers. Furniture manufacturer La-Z-Boy, for example, launched its effort by consolidating 12 Compaq servers running Windows NT onto a single Unisys ES7000 running Windows 2000 Datacenter Server. The result was reduced administrative costs, lower resource requirements, and better hardware and software control. The consolidation allowed La-Z-Boy to avoid adding more full-time employees while managing an expanding IT portfolio. La-Z-Boy consolidated its distributed servers onto three partitions on the ES7000. It placed the general-purpose infrastructure servers (imaging, file and print, e-mail, Web, backup, etc.) on one partition. Another partition contains several SQL Server databases, which were formerly spread throughout the data center. Any new application, even if hosted on a commodity server, has its database on the ES7000. The company added a third partition to run MetaFrame thin client software from Citrix Systems, Inc. (Ft. Lauderdale, Florida). La-Z-Boy intends to add two more partitions: one to accommodate Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 and another as a test environment. The IT manager cautions that, although partitioning is relatively easy to do on these machines, it is always best to rely on Unisys tools and support to make it work well.

While remaining a firm server consolidation advocate, La-Z-Boy confesses to also indulging in some scaling out using small Windows servers. In the past year, the company added about a dozen commodity Wintel servers. This, however, is less than half what the company added the year before. These servers consist mainly of smaller machines to handle domain-name system and Windows Internet naming service functions. The reason that they were not consolidated into one larger server is that they appeared to add almost no administrative burden. Without an economic incentive to place them on the ES7000, La-Z-Boy decided to go ahead with a few small servers. Plenty of room for expansion remains on the ES7000, though. Despite an expanding workload and larger databases, the ES7000 runs at an average rate of utilization of only 6 to 8 percent.



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Server Disk Management in a Windows Enviornment
Server Disk Management in a Windows Enviornment
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 197

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