Listen closely to the vendor community,and it sounds like everybody is ditching their small servers and either consolidating onto a few larger machines or buying a bank of blades that can be more tightly controlled.

We wondered how rampant this consolidation really is. Turns out, here, too, it depends on whom you ask.

"Our research shows that companies really want to reduce the number of servers under management and up utilization rates," says Clive Longbottom, an analyst at U.K.-based IT consulting firm Quocirca, "This can be for many reasons — cost cutting at the hardware capital cost level, cost cutting at the management level, lowering of real estate needs for server farms, consolidation of localities (bringing remote servers into a single server farm), and so on."

Others, however, see it as far less pervasive.

"Server consolidation does not appear to be that rampant," says Chip Nickolett, president of Comprehensive Solutions, a systems integrator and consulting firm with experience in server consolidation based in Brookfield, Wisc. "It is mainly performed by larger companies with a complex and robust infrastructure that have been looking at this as a way to reduce cost and provide more flexibility and ease of management."

During the past two years, Nickolett has seen a several types of server consolidations. Here are a few examples:

Blade Runner: Clients with Windows server or Citrix server farms, for example, have been swapping out numerous 2U and 4U servers for blade servers. This, he say, tends to happen once a support agreement becomes too expensive to maintain. Often, an organization can replace tens of single servers with one or two racks of blade servers, achieve higher performance, and be close to a break-even point when comparing the support costs of several old systems vs. the replacement cost of a new system. The space savings, reduced electrical and cooling demands, and easier infrastructure management come as a bonus. Further, SAN connection complexity and cost can sometimes be reduced.

Homogeneous Sprawl: Another scenario is in environments where various stand-alone servers service a single system or environment. As they grow or become more complex, consolidation becomes an appealing concept, as it can be achieved with relative ease. This can result in easier overall management as well as more-robust computing environments with higher levels of redundancy. It can also lower software licensing costs in situations where the same product, such as a database management system, supports many applications systems throughout the company.

Server Centralization: Some companies look to gain ground by centralizing several data centers into one large site. For example, Comprehensive Solutions helped a global distribution company that decided to consolidate systems located in Southern California, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Australia into a single Sun cluster residing in Southern California. This was a heterogeneous environment consisting of Sun, Data General (incompatible Intel and Motorola systems), and Linux systems. The systems found in the Asia/Pacific region were older hardware running obsolete operating systems that had not been patched in years, and obsolete versions of the Ingres database were in use there. It took more than a year to plan, execute a pilot project, and fully deploy this consolidation.

"While we were expecting some internationalization and localization issues, we encountered far more than we ever expected," says Nickolett. "But in the end the system was a huge success and performance improved, even for those in Asia."

You, too, should expect a host of issues to crop up when implementing such a grand scheme. Some issues that may surface are network latency, providing regional access and security, supporting multiple print queues and printers, maintaining separate databases, and supporting multiple time zones in different weeks when clocks change back or forward.