The term “data center consolidation” can mean different things to different people, from simply reducing the number of physical servers in an isolated location to reducing the global footprint of a company's entire infrastructure (including applications and software licenses, etc.).

One goal of a data center consolidation project might be to reduce power consumption costs by enabling you to consolidate servers and then monitoring, measuring, and reporting on power consumption. Real-time monitoring can provide an early warning of out-of-limits power conditions and historical power consumption information. This information can be used to assist with server consolidation and virtualization.

Using the five step process outlined in this white paper, we (BMC) were able to eliminate more than 2,000 servers from our own IT infrastructure, saving an estimated $10 million dollars in data center costs.