Amid current turbulent economic conditions, one might think staying the course and avoiding any new purchases is the wise thing to do. When it comes to an IT organization’s servers that run the business they support, that may not be the best strategy to employ.

The reason? As companies roll out new IT services to their employees and customers, they often add new servers to support each new application. These new services are often developed on one server, validated on another, and deployed on yet other servers. This leads to more and more servers being installed. As such, this approach drives up administrative and operational costs, as well as electrical costs to power and cool pools of servers used to keep a company in business.

Put another way, staying the course may drain budgets because operational costs and other soft dollar expenses (equipment warranties, licenses, updates, etc.) to support the many installed servers will be high relative to the costs of consolidating servers. Read this paper to learn more.