Organizations that previously deployed a separate server for each application or business group are moving to consolidate these applications and groups onto fewer servers. Consolidation reduces the number of physical servers to increase efficiencies and savings by reducing the number of physical locations, servers, software licenses, and points of management. Improvements in the capacity of hardware, such as multiprocessor-based servers; software, such as Windows Server 2003 and Windows Storage Server 2003; and storage, such as storage area networks, are facilitating consolidation, but if a consolidation effort is not well-planned and executed, the anticipated benefits may not be realized.

Windows Server 2003 Supports Consolidation

In addition to improved availability and performance, Windows Server 2003 also boasts a number of technical improvements that make it easier to consolidate servers for file and print networking, Web and application servers, messaging, database servers, and core infrastructure. The actual opportunities and benefits of consolidation vary by the role the server performs.

Windows Server 2003 boasts a number of technical improvements that make it easier to consolidate servers for various processing roles. The opportunities, benefits, and difficulties of consolidation vary by the role the server performs.

How Windows Server 2003 Aids Consolidation

Windows Server 2003 has features that allow consolidation of servers for several types of functions:

File and print networking. Among the improvements in Windows Server 2003 that facilitate the consolidation of file and print servers, the most notable are improved support for network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SANs), which allow servers to efficiently access large amounts of data, and the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), which takes snapshots of stored data to speed data backup and restoration. Windows Server 2003 can also handle more print queues, and print queue performance is better than on previous versions.

Web and application servers. The Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server in Windows Server 2003 better isolates processes, starts a Web service only when it receives a request from a client, and can restart separate applications without restarting IIS. These improvements reduce the risk of consolidating multiple Web servers with different Web-based applications onto a single server. For example, online dating service Match.com used Windows Server 2003 to reduce its number of Web servers from more than 100 to fewer than 50.