The emergence of increasingly powerful hardware architectures at competitive prices enables the consolidation of services offered through dispersed systems. GMV has extensive experience in consolidation projects, which result in the following benefits:
- Substantial improvement on Maintainability: since applications and services are consolidated in the same architecture, the installation is done uniformly. Therefore, when facing an incident, the operating and maintenance teams will deal with all applications and services more efficiently. Additionally, having a smaller number of systems results in a reduction of the time spent in periodic maintenance tasks such as applying patches, backups, etc.
- High Availability: architectures subject to systems consolidation provide high availability mechanisms which benefit all the applications and services included in these architectures. This characteristic significantly reduces MTBO (Mean Time Between Outages), enabling the installation of system software updates without the loss of service.
- Environment Standardization: the applications and services included in consolidated architectures must use the same operating systems and basic software (Applications Server, Database, etc.) so they adapt to such environment. This environment standardization results in a lower number of preproduction and development environments, which makes management easier. It has been proven that development and testing time is substantially reduced in standardized environments. On the other hand, there is also a substantial reduction on the number of incidences in those consolidated platforms.
- Reusability of licenses: a set of basic software, with the corresponding licenses, is available to all services within a consolidated architecture, so that the incorporation of a new service does not imply the purchase of new licenses.
- Greater use of the Hardware: consolidated architectures enable sharing hardware resources among all the services, by adapting these resources to the specific needs of the services, and enabling easy adaptation to new service needs.
Likewise, the emergence of powerful hardware architectures has enabled the evolution of System Virtualization, which allows several operating systems to run with their corresponding services within a single hardware architecture. The advantages associated with System Virtualization include:
- System Consolidation: The use of virtual machines to consolidate several physical servers in a few physical host servers with virtual machines. Physical servers are therefore "transformed" into a guest virtual machine residing in a host system of virtual machines. This virtualization technique is also known as Physical-to-Virtual (P2V)
- Crash Recovery: Virtual machines can be used as "hot standby" environments for physical servers in production. This technique changes the classic philosophy of "backup-and-restore" to secure copies of the virtual machines images to be launched in active virtual machines that can assume control of the workload of the unavailable production server, in order to reduce MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery)
- Independent Services: Services in the same server can be separated in a way that they can be operated independently.
- Environment Replication: Images of the virtual machines that are in production can be used to replicate pre-production environments identical to production environments (except for hardware resources). This way, for example, you could test the installation of a patch in a preproduction environment identical to the production environment and verify its proper function. Similarly, they can be used to create developmental environments.
- Less Complexity: System diversity and the costs associated with the management and operation of data centers are reduced.
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