by Susan Twombly, Nov. 2006
IT consolidation is about optimizing IT to increase business value.
It's critical to effectively addressing many of the challenges that are currently keeping CIOs and IT professionals up at night.
It's also a very efficient strategy for streamlining infrastructures, virtualizing a data center and shifting resources from maintenance to innovation.
Read on to find out how these customers leveraged HP consolidation solutions to achieve these and other benefits.
The world's largest airport operator, London-based BAA plc, handles some 141 million passengers a year across its seven airports. At one time, 80 servers ran 135 separate databases holding information from parking to security and consuming large amounts of data center space and energy.
Consolidating onto HP ProLiant server clusters and HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array products not only reduced the server count by 18, it lowered the energy and hosting costs involved in servicing 12,000 users by 20 percent.
"It prevented us from having to build a new data center, expand our present real estate and pay more for hosting, cooling, power supplies emergency alarms, network components and other infrastructure necessities," says BAA Windows Operations Manager Robert Harris.
HP OpenView and HP Systems Insight Manager software centralize control and service status across the environment, while HP mission critical services and SAN management services help maintain ongoing operations.
After a major organizational realignment, Germany's printing press giant Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG needed to consolidate and simplify IT systems and services.
"We had a completely scattered, decentralized environment — you name it, we had it running in Heidelberger," says Vice President of IT Infrastructure Howard Hutchings.
Now, an HP ProLiant server and a HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array storage solution links multiple storage area networks — housing more than 16 TB of data and consolidating more than 193 heterogeneous sites around the world into a single, standardized desktop and storage environment.
HP Services and HP OpenView management software help reduce the complexity involved with handling such a massive environment. As a result, Heidelberger has a centralized, overall view of storage resources to improve storage utilization and simplify management. Next up: consolidating more than 11,000 e-mail boxes worldwide.
In Seattle, Washington, Group Health Cooperative used HP total print management solutions to consolidate its imaging and printing environment with HP printers and multifunction products (MFPs) — reducing the number of printers from over 3,000 to about 1,600 workgroup devices.
With the HP Pay-per-use program, Group Health pays a basic charge per printer and a "click" charge for each page output. Printer maintenance and delivery of all necessary replacement supplies are also included. HP Web Jetadmin software shows the status of each device, providing a centralized, proactive approach to printer maintenance. It also makes ordering supplies and scheduling maintenance easier.
In total, consolidation helped Group Health Cooperative cut printing costs from US$5 million to a little over US$3 million.
» Find out more about HP IT consolidation solutions
|
Printable version
