Data Center Consolidation: A Step towards Infrastructure Clouds

Application service providers face enormous challenges and rising costs in managing and operating a growing number of heterogeneous system and computing landscapes. Limitations of traditional computing environments force IT decision-makers to reorganize computing resources within the data center, as continuous growth leads to an inefficient utilization of the underlying hardware infrastructure. This paper discusses a way for infrastructure providers to improve data center operations based on the findings of a case study on resource utilization of very large business applications and presents an outlook beyond server consolidation endeavors, transforming corporate data centers into compute clouds.