What's the fuss about... server consolidation?

Remember the mainframe? Quocirca's Clive Longbottom certainly does - and it might just be the answer to your modern computing needs...

There you are - the exciting, heady days are long gone since you installed your first copy of MS-mail for the company. Now, with every employee having at least one account, and the marketing department wanting an extra couple of thousand for info@, events@, march22@ and so on, you find yourself with more than a few servers dotted around the company running Exchange or Domino, all having to be aware of each other and needing the occasional kick up the proverbial to keep them all in sync and working.

As the capabilities of the Wintel environment continue to grow, we have often been offered the opportunity to consolidate our mail servers back down to a more manageable cluster or even single box, managing our total Exchange/Domino environment - but headroom issues still appear, requiring more reconfigurations of the hardware. New versions of the OS and/or the mail application continue to appear, creating a nightmare of upgrade downtime for the techies as the business tries to continue running on a 24 x 7 basis without the availability of email.

Oh, for the Elysian days of centralised systems such as All-in-One on the Vax or PROFS on the mainframe - an administrator's dream: one administrator looking after one piece of hardware with everyone's details on it. Pity that the systems were proprietary, and that the administrator tended to have the company over a barrel&.

However, maybe it's time we revisited the idea. Firstly, what are you actually using your current email software for? If it is purely for messaging, then the technologies are advanced enough that the use of Exchange or Domino is not actually going to provide you with much in the way of hard business advantage over others in your market - it is when the system isn't behaving itself that you are at a disadvantage. If this sort of commoditised messaging is the main use of email within your organisation (and for the majority of companies, it is), then keep on reading...

In the same way as Quocirca believes that you should not view IT as a core competency (see What's the fuss about... selective outsourcing? http://www.silicon.com/a55915 ), commodity services such as email should be viewed as hygiene factors - they should either be essentially self-running and low maintenance, or they should be outsourced. If you really want to keep them in-house, then you really need to rationalise the way you deal with them.

So, empty your minds, remove the baggage and perceptions of the last 20 years, and join me on a voyage, back to the future...

Imaging a system that can happily support tens of thousands of email boxes on a single machine. Imagine that this system can also deal with SMS messaging, with faxes, with multi-channel, convergent messaging. Imagine that it can be updated without any impact on the running of the solution or the business. Imagine that all your users carry on using their client of choice. Imagine that you can set up whole rafts of new email boxes for specific events or needs, and then easily clean them out after the event has happened, so keeping your directories clean.

Imagine that the solution is based on a recognised, open operating system that provides a low cost of entry and low ongoing costs. Imagine that the solution requires no special data centre, no extra air conditioning, power considerations or arcane skills.

Are you imagining a mainframe computer? Strange as it may seem, IBM has resurrected the mainframe, made it smaller, made it so that you can put as many virtual Linux servers on it as you ever likely to need, ported over some of the more widely accepted email solutions (SendMail, Bynari), and will be making Domino available in the coming months.

With other companies such as Oracle, SAP and Stellent also porting their solutions to the mainframe version of Linux (zLinux for zSeries), you can start to see if the capabilities of the platform can help your business in other ways.

Granted, this approach is not for everyone. For those wedded to Exchange, Hell will freeze over before an IBM mainframe solution an option. For these people, Intel-based 'mainframe' quality machines such as Unisys' CMP architectured ES7000 series provide a similar approach. For those who are utilising the full collaborative services of Domino, they will have to wait until the Domino for zLinux port is complete (and tested properly). For those who have embedded MAPI calls into their applications and utilise messaging beyond the normal call of duty, it is less of an impact for them to continue with their chosen toolset.

Even for those who do choose the route of the Big Iron, there will be issues. Firstly is the skills issue - you will need some basic skills in running a zSeries - this is not an Intel-based machine, and the whole nomenclature around the beast is different. You will need Linux skills - less of a problem than it was, and you may well find that some of your techies are already Linux users outside of the office. You will need to migrate your current directories over to the chosen solution and set up all the mailboxes, but tools are available to minimise the impact. And, most importantly, as a techie, you will have to withstand the withering looks from your peers when you say that you have 'progressed' to a mainframe.

But, for those who have the courage, the ultimate in server consolidation can provide a better up-time for your company, greater capabilities to deal with the peaks and troughs of user needs, less impact to the business when it comes to upgrades, and a machine where you can enable the Linux guys in your organisation to happily play to their hearts content without impacting the business or any other application or service running on the machine.