Ask business executives what tools they are focused on and eight out of 10 times they’ll say server optimization. It is little wonder why. Most servers are grossly underutilized, processing at a fraction of their potential capacity, while still eating up a nice chunk of your IT budget. By optimizing those underachieving servers, you can harness that capacity more effectively either to increase the business return on your IT infrastructure or reduce the investment and expense required to maintain it.

Sounds good so far, but unfortunately server optimization is not as simple as putting more applications and storage on each server. In fact, server optimization is a blanket term addressing four approaches to IT infrastructure consolidation. Although the optimization approaches do get more complex as you move from top to bottom, the financial and operational rewards also increase. The four approaches are:

* Logical Consolidation: This refers to an IT department that implements a unified management system across its servers. Although logical consolidation does not relocate or consolidate any servers, it does simplify management and eases the IT workload.

* Centralized Consolidation: This involves moving servers to one or two locations. Rather than maintaining servers at various branch offices, everything is housed at centralized locations — at the company headquarters or data center, for example.

* Physical Consolidation: With physical consolidation, an organization reduces the total number of servers by merging the workload onto fewer, more powerful servers.

* Operational Consolidation: Also called application consolidation, operational consolidation is the most complex. Unlike physical consolidation, an operational consolidation runs multiple platforms and diverse applications on a single server (or cluster). This technique uses partitioning and virtualization to run many  virtual servers on a single machine.

Critically, server optimization is not an all-or-nothing proposition, and opting for logical or centralized consolidation over the short term does not eliminate the opportunity to achive physical or operational consolidation at a later time. In fact, the opposite is true. Here’s a simple and scalable framework: