IBM White Paper Sample

The challenges created by this situation have become all too familiar. Fragmented server bases expand management overhead, increase pressures on system administration and technical support staff, magnify network complexities, and make it more difficult to maintain availability and security. Power costs as well as demands on data center space and cooling infrastructures continue to escalate.

Large-scale server virtualization may mitigate some of these effects. But users are discovering that reductions in numbers of physical servers are accompanied by new challenges in managing and securing more complex, multi-layer software environments.

Many large organizations are moving aggressively to deal with these issues. New strategies are being adopted, new tools are being deployed, and new skill sets and operating practices are being developed.

But what does the picture look like for organizational units that operate smaller server bases -- dozens of platforms, or at most a few hundred? The IT groups of business units, divisions, and equivalents face the same challenges as their corporate-level counterparts -- but fewer resources are available to them.