Dresdner Bank & Wyndham International: The Business Case for Server Consolidation Chapter 3 Case 2

Current Trend Continued use of a mix of large central servers & smaller servers in branch offices and local sites. Reversing the trend of placing small server computer systems throughout an organization’s computer network. Reducing the number of local servers and consolidating many server functions into a smaller number of large networked servers that can be managed centrally.

Benefits Realized Hardware, training, can travel costs (for server administrative and maintenance personnel) Networks are more manageable. System performance monitor software keeps servers and networks running at optimal speeds by monitoring performance and reallocating resources to break bottlenecks.

Benefits Realized - cont. New generation server racks result in savings on equipment costs and the costs of power management and maintenance contracts.

Balancing Act Anticipated savings of small server computers must be balanced off against the increased risks of system failure affecting more users and vital business processes. Increased server security and redundancy must be designed into small/centralized server systems. Network scalability, security, and availability become are so critical to the firm’s health, that there is no room for error.

Dresdner Bank: Goal Reduce its total number of servers, while keeping in mind that some of their branches will continue to run local applications on local servers.

Wyndham International: Goal Save costs through server consolidation - Wyndham estimates it will lower its hardware costs by as much as 40 percent in one year.