The Case for Server Consolidation: Or Back to the Glass House
Ellen Friedman Jerry Rosenberg SRM Associates, Ltd. CMG 99 Session # 322
December 7, 1999
Agenda
• • • • • Overview Why Server Consolidation? Cost Considerations General Sizing Considerations Enterprise Server Requirements- for consolidation
– Benchmarking considerations and findings
• Summary
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Overview
• Goals include: business integration and transparency of information across the enterprise. • Integrated systems are too large to run small servers.
– Require larger scale more stable platforms
• Server Consolidation is the solution!
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Overview (cont’d)
• Frequent Issues with smaller distributed environments
– Unavailabilty of service – High service response times due to bottlenecks – Difficulty in developing new cross-application or data services. – Inability to support Web services based on secure and consistent data.
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Why Consider Consolidation?
• Controlling system management costs are more difficult in a decentralized environment.
• Network and Configuration management • Problem/Change and Operational management (for both automated & manual operations) • Security administration costs
• Decentralized personnel and skill set • Hidden costs inside departmental budgets • Excess server-based software license costs
• Under utilized resources: servers, disks, maintenance. • Lack of scalability: Growth requires additional servers.
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Server Consolidation Benefits
• Technical complexity is minimized and support staff issues are reduced. • Single point of control offers a disciplined approach to managing IT resources. • Less management cost is the key!
– Distributed systems are more labor-intensive than centralized ones. – Reducing servers - reduces time and expense to perform all requisite tasks (capacity, performance etc.)
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It’s Time to Consolidate When:
(InfoWorld Magazine 9/15/97, top 10 list)
10. 9. 8. 7. 6.
You start losing track of your servers Your hardware is having seizures over scalability. You have more administrators than you have users. You’re running 15 different operating systems. You don’t know if you are in compliance with all of your software licenses.
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It’s Time to Consolidate When:
5. Capacity planning is a synonym for buying more servers. 4. Department managers routinely purchase and install their own servers (but leave management to you). 3. Utilization rates for more than half your servers are in the single digits. 2. Physical security of every server could only be accomplished by Star Trek-like shields (rather than locking the door to a single room).
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It’s Time to Consolidate When:
• And the No. 1 sign that your company is a prime candidate for consolidation: You spend more on server upkeep than the U.S. government owes.
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Managing the IT Cost components:
Hardware
Software
People
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Managing the IT Cost components: People Costs
People Hardware Software
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Cost Considerations
• People Costs • Hardware Costs • Major savings in consolidation is reduction of people costs. • Past unsuccessful attempts at cost reduction by limiting focus to 1 or 2 components.
– Limiting capacity – Limiting software costs by keeping old versions – Imposing inflexible standards
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Cost Analysis
• Gartner group: 81% of IT managers found significant cost reductions by consolidating.
– Consolidating 6 small servers into a pair of larger machines showed a 35-45% reduction due to decrease in internal support costs – Another example of consolidating 600 servers to 200 nodes - resulted in a 60% reduction in system support. – Unix consolidation of 36 servers to a 36 node RS/6000 SP box yielded a monthly reduction in support labor costs of 60%. Overall cost savings for SP was 35%. – Benefit was improved manageability, performance and service. SRM Associates, Ltd
Cost Analysis
• Gartner study considered costs of
– – – – – – – – – Storage management and administration Backup and recovery Trouble shooting Performance tuning and monitoring Hardware Costs Software licenses Facilities requirements Cost of outages, manpower requirements Loss of business leverage caused by lack of complete data in a timely fashion.
• Following Factors must be considered in an evaluation:
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The Top 10 Application Considerations for server consolidation
1. Data Accessibility/Data Sharing 2. Data security and integrity requirements, 3. Ease of integration with other enterprise applications 4. Performance expectations, 5. Reliability 6. Manageability- System management ease and cost, 7. Avalability and Servicability 8. Scalability, 9. Recovery and Contingency considerations 10. Ability to exploit new technology
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Server Consolidation Opportunities
• Physical consolidation – Creating a Glass House by centralizing all servers in one location. • Operational Consolidation - Creating one logical
machine and consolidating servers into a single system.
§ Moving the distributed servers onto separate nodes of a clustered multi-node UNIX server e.g, an IBM RS/6000 SP or Sequent Server. • Moving the distributed servers onto separate partitions of an S/390 system or a Sun Enterprise 10000 system
§ Application Integration- Consolidating the
applications to run as a single large application by restructuring the applications and databases
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Server Consolidation Opportunities:
Benefits of Physical Consolidation
• Consolidating multiple instances of the same application into a central location ==>
• Reduction in system management costs and improvements to processing • Reduction, or elimination, of user department operational costs by sharing facilities • Improvements in physical security - eliminating the need for securing multiple small environments • Improved recoverability after an outage - more available personnel and better hardware
• e.g., faster tapes to perform restores
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Benefits of Operational Consolidation
• Creating one logical machine/central server location e.g., multi-node cluster IBM RS/6000 SP ==>
• Possible reduction in software licenses costs • Automated reliability and availability achieved via the RAS hardware as opposed to application-based solutions • Reduction in systems costs including operational, maintenance, number of systems to manage. • Improved service times due to reduction in intersystem communication.
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Server Consolidation Opportunities:
Benefits of Operational Consolidation
• Examples of Applications that would benefit:
1. Consolidation of 3-Tiered ArchitectureClient/Application Server/Database Server. 2. Consolidation of WEB servers. 3. Consolidation of LAN servers e.g., Print and Back-up.
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Server Consolidation Opportunities:
Benefits of Operational Consolidation
• Consolidation of 3-Tiered ArchitectureClient/Application Server/Database Server. – 3Tier- Application Layer, Presentation Layer, Data Layer.
• Layers can be spread across multiple platforms • Gain benefit by running on a single platform such as Enterprise 10000 in separate domains.
– Reduce communication time between components and thereby improve response time.
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Server Consolidation Opportunities:
Benefits of Operational Consolidation
• Consolidation of WEB servers
– Closer proximity of servers can facilitate communications. – Web serving and E-commerce can be simplified given secure access to data residing in legacy databases. – Higher availability, facilities for disaster recovery planning and hot back-up can be achieved with SP, E10000 and S/390.
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Server Consolidation Opportunities:
Benefits of Operational Consolidation
• Consolidation of LAN servers
– More reliable back-ups performed by central data center - (higher speed disk, tape, reduced equipment costs). – Improved Systems Management- by administration from a central site. – More effective software distribution – Improved physical security – Ability to better manage systems storage – Reduction in cost/complexity of print environments – Improved scalability over distributed servers.
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Server Consolidation Opportunities:
Benefits of Application Integration
• Example: Application replicated across multiple servers - Far East, Europe, US
– Restructure to be a central server- benefits from centralized data • Redesign application and DBMS and back-end programs and DSS systems have greater timely access to data.
• Example: A Portfolio management systemEquities, Bonds, Multiple currencies.
– Reduce SQL net and NFS usage. – Opportunities for e-business- by integrating applications.
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Server Consolidation Opportunities:
Benefits of Application Integration
• Benefits for move to a central location include:
– reduced systems mgmt costs, improved availability of service, potential for improved r/t, improved recoverability etc.
• Benefits for move to a multi-node cluster provide the following add’l benefits;
– reduction in software licenses, operator costs, number of systems to manage – opportunity for new services by enabling or improving interaction between different app’s, new app’s and existing systems. SRM Associates, Ltd
Summary: Server Consolidation Benefits
• The costs of delivering service are reduced • Scalability allows for prompt reaction to changing business needs • A more standard, controlled infrastructure is employed offering greater service availability • Investments in existing corporate resources are leveraged • Opportunities for new services by enabling or improving interaction between different applications and access to data residing in legacy systems
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Server Sizing Considerations
• Business imperatives- e.g., E-commerce and Ebusiness, • Need to align IT with business goals are driving the selection process toward enterprise class servers! • Combining multiple instances into a single server:
• Reduce the effort and time in consolidating varying views of critical databases dist’d across the enterprise. • Improve R/T of DSS based queries • Enable efficient processing of a wide spectrum of concurrent query types (both I/O and CPU intensive).
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Server Sizing Considerations
• Sizing considerations are dependent upon application req’ts, database req’ts, and architecture of the platform.
– UNIX vs. S/390 each have their place – S/390 for heterogeneous, I/O intensive wklds with large working sets. – UNIX for parallel, homogenous , CPU intensive with small working sets. • Workload Growth can be handled via:
– SMP, Clusters of servers, Dist’d databases with requests shipped between servers.
• Standard benchmarks can be used to compare processor power- TPC-A, TPC-C, Oracle SAP.
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Server Sizing Considerations
S/390 vs. UNIX
• Mr. Steve MacKay, Chief Technical Officer of Sun Microsystems, as quoted in Investors Daily in March, 1999 “Peak performance is an area that SUN is working on, and one of the advantages of the mainframe over UNIX is that mainframes are capable of running at 85-95% of capacity. UNIX servers run at 20%- 30% of peak load”. • Usable capacity is greater in S/390
– Multiple database instances may be required to satisfy performance req’ts of disparate workloads- DSS. Web serving, Data Mining.
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S/390 vs. UNIX Usable Capacity
Utilization UNIX peak S/390 Peak UNIX Average S390 Average Usable Capacity Multiplier
CPU utilization at sub-second response time Disk capacity utilization
50-60%
100%
20-30%
65-75%
3X
20-30%
60-75%
3X
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S/390 vs. UNIX Usable Capacity
100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% UNIX CPU S/390 CPU UNIX Disk S/390 Disk
Note: Usable Capacity Multiplier = 3
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PEAK AVG
Comparing Typical Disk Req’ts: Usable Capacity (700 GB database)
Capacity Required by UNIX at 25% Utilization Capacity Required by S/390 at 70% Utilization Usable Capacity Multiplier
1 DB Instance
2.8 TB
1 TB
2.8 X
2 DB Instances
5.6 TB
2 TB
2.8 X
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Comparing Typical Disk Req’ts: Usable Capacity (measured in TB for a
700 GB database)
6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1 DB Instance 2 DB Instances
Usable Capacity Multiplier = 2.8
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5.6
2.8 2 1
UNIX @ 25% S/390 @ 75%
Performance Measurement Data
for Sizing Consolidation Platforms
• Data gathered from each of the applications and servers that are candidates for consolidation.
– – – – –
Application and system design requirements Service level requirements Workload Characteristics (OLTP,DSS, Database) Chargeback and costing figures Resource Usage information for each of the workloads
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Performance Measurement Data System, Workload and DBMS usage
• System and application: processor utilization, disk utilization, storage resources. • Network utilization and bandwidth • Device characteristics:
Processor class/speed, Disk types and characteristics
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• DBMS statistics: – Concurrent users – Query types – Size of raw database – Data/Log/Temp sizes and mapping to devices – Back-up requirements
Performance Measurement Data: System and Application Design, Service levels and Workload Characteristics
• System and Appl’n Design Information:
– Application dependencies and integration requirements. – Ease of migration – Platform dependencies – RAS, security issues
• Workload Characteristics
– Database – OLTP vs. DSS – Load statistics:average and peak
• Costing/Chargeback Algorithms
– Review costs for processor, disk etc.
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Benchmarking Results Large Enterprise Servers
• Benchmarking results for SAP and TPmC. – OLTP environments- comparisons of different platforms with Oracle. – Benchmarks provide a method for comparing how various hardware vendors scale to support large environments.
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S/390 vs. Sun Starfire SAP Benchmark Results
System SD Users # DB Instances CPUs % Utilization Date MIPS
IBM S/390 RY5
8,000 SD (3-way Sysplex)
30
332 MHz
97%
7/98
1380
Sun Starfire 336
14,400 SD
64
336 MHz
82%
8/98
2552
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SAP Benchmark Results
16,000 14,400 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,552 1,380 2,000 0 SD MIPS USERS
100 90 80
97 82 64
IBM S/390 RY5 SUN STARFIRE 336
70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
30
DB Instances
% Utilization
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TPmC Benchmark Results Source: Sun Home page TPmC Benchmark Results
TPC-C System
TPmC
Database
Availability Date
Database Instances
SUN E10000 Starfire (64way) Sequent NUMA-Q 2000 (64 way) IBM RS/6000 SP Model (309)
115,395.73
Oracle 8I Enterprise Edition 8.1.5 Oracle 8 Enterprise Edition 8.0.4 Oracle 8 Enterprise
8-22-1999
1
93,9000.85
6-15-1999
16
57,053.80
4-30-1998
8
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TPmC Benchmark Results
115,395 120,000 100,000 80,000 60,000 40,000 20,000 0 TPmC
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16
16
93,900 SUN E10K (64 Way) Sequent NMA-Q 2000 (64 Way) IBM RS/6000 SP(309)
14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 Database Instances 1 8
57,053
Server Selection Summary General Costing Considerations
• The following costs will be reduced with centralization:
– Support requirements – Amount of time required for back-ups and cost of labor. – Software licensing when the number of footprints is reduced.
• The following costs may increase with centralization:
• Network req’ts and costs- users will be further away.
• Processor utilization can be improved
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• Can combine multiple workloads/systems
Server Selection Summary
• Large, single system servers can meet the demands for SAP, OLTP and DSS environments. • Today’s business needs include rapid adaptability for data warehousing, DSS systems, implementation of E-commerce.
– Require RAS and meet all business req’ts.
• Reduce costs once platforms can meet these.
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Summary
• Consolidated environments offer:
– – – – Higher availability Greater servicability (reduced response times) More flexibiltiy. Additional benefits from: • centralization of staff, reduction in maintenance licensing and system management.
• The time is now right to reevaluate!!
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References
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. InfoWorld Magazine, “Its time to Consolidate”, September 15, 1997 Gartner Group Study, K-LAN-308: Dave Cappucio: February 27, 1995 Consolidating UNIX Systems onto OS/390, SG24-2090, IBM Corp.. Selecting a Server, The Value of S/390, SG24-4812-01, IBM Corp.. Sun Homepage, http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/10000 IBM S/390 Homepage, http://www.s390.ibm.com/marketing/gf22509.html. Brian L. Wong , Configuration and Capacity Planning for Solaris Servers
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and How to find us
Ellen Friedman SRM Associates, Ltd 516-433-1817 ellen@srmassoc.com More information on our web site: www.srmassoc.com
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