HP ProLiant 3000 Server Consolidation with Compaq ProLiant Servers - Page 5

Server Consolidation with Compaq ProLiant Servers 5 Corporations that rely on business critical applications may benefit from application management capabilities, a core feature of logical consolidation Management software costs, installation labor and time are all factors that can inhibit a management application installation Logical Consolidation Organizations that may benefit from logical consolidation rely on business critical applications such as ERP, business intelligence, e-commerce, Internet, Intranet, mail and collaboration products. These applications are often difficult to control and benefit from management applications that ease their administration and reduce downtime. With logical consolidation, application management tools improve application availability, significantly reduce downtime and decrease IT labor costs. Logical consolidation centralizes IT support staff and gives them the ability to manage centrally located or distributed applications. Additionally, logical consolidation automates tasks and applies application management across many systems at once to resolve common problems such as disk space utilization and software updates. Benefits of Logical Consolidation The valuable benefits of logical consolidation include: • Extended uptime: by proactively monitoring system resources and solving application problems before they fail. • Increased administrator productivity: by automating and centralizing tasks, making it easier to maintain or improve network, systems and application performance. • Reduced total cost of ownership: by minimizing the number of man hours required to perform installations, upgrades and application management. • Improved application availability: by reducing planned and unplanned downtime, assuring users access to network and computing resources. • Enhanced data management capabilities: by centralizing administration of data used in mission critical applications. Tradeoffs of Logical Consolidation Research has revealed that any tradeoffs of logical consolidation can be offset if a proper solution is implemented. The primary challenges of installing application management tools include the material costs of the management software, the labor required to install the solution and the time needed to fully implement a solution. An installation can take months to fully implement and IT staffers must be trained to fully utilize the functionality of management tools. Fortunately Compaq logical consolidation solutions, as revealed in a major study conducted by IDC, realize a return on investment in an average of only 77 days. ECGO30/0499