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Server Utilization Methodology

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by big mick

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My uncle's company has a huge quantity of servers that are underutilized. His firm has "poked & sniffed" around only to determine that most are being used at 20% or less utilization.

They can save money if they reduce the number of servers needed - and use the freed up machines for new initiatives. If I can, I'd like to get in on the action and "piggyback" more than one application on these machines.

Do you have any idea where I can get some generic background on Server Utilization Methodology?

3 replies

by timthetoolman

Hi,

If you wanted to piggyback the applications then you need to be sure of a few things.

Most importantly...will the applications behave if they are put together. In some cases (although much less these days) some applications simply wont runin another's presence.

Secondly... is the server experiencing any bottlenecks so that adding another application would be detrimental.

The only way to determine that is do performance monitoring on the two servers and verify that their addition wont cause a bottleneck. For instance if one server uses lots of memory (due to a big application, but not much CPU, then that might fit well with a high CPU use application that doesn't use much memory.

Check network bandwidth too. There are lots of places bottlenecks can occur. Memory primarily, but also CPU, disk IOs and Network. Disk space required itself is another thing to watch.

You'll only get this information by measurement.

The other thing to consider is whether the usage ofan application will grow or not. If its a new system with not too many people using it yet, then you can expect growth and need to allow for that.

Hope this helps,
Cheers,
Tim.

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