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Server consolidation is fast becoming the strategy of choice for IT organizations faced with burgeoning costs from their distributed application environments. The success stories are piling up: The Gap reported saving $2 million annually by consolidating from 269 two-way servers to 10 eight-way servers, and reaping a 43% improvement in ROI over two years. Pella consolidated 16 Microsoft Exchange mail servers down to six, increasing reliability and cutting costs in half. JetBlue.com consolidated 64 servers down to just three boxes, saving more than 60% in staffing and maintenance costs.

According to IDC research, 79% of U.S. organizations are in the middle of server and storage consolidation projects, up from 52% in 2000. "And the vast majority - 85% to 90% of the users we've surveyed - are happy with the way things have gone and plan to do more," says Matt Eastwood, program director of worldwide server research IDC.

But as with any IT project, there's a right way and a wrong way to approach server consolidation. The primary hurdles to success, users and analysts say, are not so much technical as they are organizational and political.

Get buy-in

When IT is decentralized, "getting other groups to buy in to the consolidation idea is not easy," says Devin York, IT director of financial systems for Continental Airlines in Houston.

Under York's guidance, the financial systems group spearheaded the consolidation of 50 application servers for six departments onto two 32-way HP 9000 Superdome servers running HP-UX, saving the airline $2 million off the bat and $1 million a year in maintenance costs.

But Continental's internal setup made the process difficult. At the airline, IT projects are departmentally driven. Over the years, this had helped each department better track and limit costs, but it had left the company's data center with a hodgepodge of space-eating, difficult-to-maintain application servers.

"Every group had its own Web server, application tier and database server, so for every group there were at least three boxes that needed to be supported and maintained," York says. Some mission-critical departmental applications were distributed, as well. Some pieces of his group's revenue accounting package were housed on the mainframe,while other parts were on different servers across the company.