It would be an understatement to say that Bill Pilarski and Ken Pepple know a thing or two about data center consolidation.

As data center practice manager at Sun, Pilarski manages a team of technical and sales development resources that provide data center optimization and consolidation solutions to Sun customers. Pepple co-authored a book on consolidation, Consolidation in the Data Center: Simplifying IT Environments to Reduce Total Cost of Ownership.

Pilarski and Pepple sat down with Sun Inner Circle to discuss the factors driving Web tier expansion, the challenges it creates, and how to realize the benefits of consolidation.

IC: What is causing the expansion of the Web tier infrastructure at most companies?

BILL: The Web tier is not simply limited to the components that drive the interface, but also those that support the infrastructure for providing a service on the Web. And there are several factors driving the expansion of the Web tier. First and foremost is the growth of Web services, as well as the need to support those services — especially because the services are being deployed in rapid fashion due to the competitive nature of the marketplace. Plus, in today's environments, Web services are often deployed on commodity-type infrastructure components. So, companies are witnessing the rapid expansion of the underlying infrastructure that supports Web services. Essentially, the desire to compete more aggressively tends to balloon the Web services infrastructure at most companies.

KEN: Exactly. Just because the Web boom ended in 2000, people didn't stop going to the Internet. Nor did it curtail the applications written for the Internet. As long as more companies and people depend on the Internet, there are going to be more Web applications. And that means a larger Web tier presence, especially for companies that are deploying a separate set of Web tier servers for each application. Also, some expansion in the Web tier is due to the increasing importance of security. Today there is the more frequent use of SSL, which results in more servers because of the increased processing load. And both of those factors are only going to increase going forward.

IC: How is Web tier expansion affecting IT organizations?

BILL: In order to stay competitive in the Web marketplace, companies are on an aggressive schedule to deploy new functionality, features, and services. So they have application teams working day and night to develop improvements — whether that's new functions and features in existing applications or great new Web services that might give them competitive advantage. In this race to gain market share, companies need to scale very aggressively and very quickly. There is a factor in the speed of business that the world hasn't seen before, and that's driving IT organizations to be more agile, adept, and flexible at responding to the needs of business units and customers.

KEN: At the same time, IT budgets are tight while the demands of the business are increasing. So, organizations have to examine more creative ways to save money. Specifically, companies are increasingly turning their attention to power consumption, cooling costs, and the size of data center real estate. As part of the desire to limit those expenses, organizations are increasingly looking to outsource and consolidate.

IC: What are the organizational challenges that arise as a result of Web tier expansion?

BILL: The greatest challenge is the proliferation of the infrastructure components necessary to support the Web tier. The dot-com era was essentially the tipping point for businesses deploying Web servers as part of a market play. What companies didn't recognize back then was that the proliferation was not going to be incremental — rather it was going to be rapid and almost uncontrolled.

Today, organizations find that they're seeing not only hundreds of servers being deployed for new services, but also literally thousands of servers being deployed over a period of time. And all of those servers need to be supported. Plus, the technology must be continually refreshed. So the question becomes: how does a company support an infrastructure from a maintenance perspective in order to help ensure the infrastructure is reliable and highly available?

IC: How do the challenges of Web tier expansion affect the IT departments at today's enterprises?

BILL: Traditionally, the deployment of new functions, features, and services has been a very methodical process. The challenge now is that change happens much more quickly, and a company can lose its competitive advantage if it's not able to respond. Companies need to have flexible IT organizations that can be very responsive and deliver the business agility that's required by the marketplace.

KEN: Plus, there are challenges unique to the Web tier. Unlike the database and application tiers, with Web servers there isn't as big a problem with data consolidation. But you do have some new challenges because the Web tier servers are most likely co-located at a location that is charging for the power, space, and cooling.

IC: Once companies understand the costs in terms of procurement, power, real estate, and cooling, how do they begin to address the issues raised by Web tier expansion?

KEN: Standardize wherever possible. That is the biggest lesson for effective Web tier consolidation. If a company can decide on a standard Web server with a fairly standard configuration, it can do some really great things in terms of consolidating the Web tier. On the other hand if a company is supporting five different Web servers with 10 different plug-ins and 15 different configurations, it limits flexibility, increases costs, and heightens security risks.

BILL: Also, companies need to change their mindset around the commodity nature of the Web tier. As companies begin to look at the Web tier infrastructure differently, they begin to realize that they cannot continue to expand in an uncontrolled fashion without having severe impact on the availability and reliability of an environment. It is important for organizations to look more holistically at how an environment is managed to begin implementing standard operating environments and proper configuration management.

IC: Once organizations decide to consolidate, how do they typically approach the task of doing so?

BILL: Companies need to learn to balance the need to consolidate quickly with the ability to scale down without impacting business operations. To do so, many of today's enterprises try to virtualize an existing environment on better performing servers as a first step — essentially keeping the same number of operating system instances, but scaling down the physical footprint of the environment.

While that might be a good beginning, companies are not really reducing the burden for maintaining the operating system environment. In order to truly realize further optimization, companies need to consolidate the application infrastructure. The goal is to have a consistent framework that requires fewer variations or fewer disparate configurations in the application infrastructure.

IC: When it comes to helping customers realize the benefits of consolidation, how does Sun distinguish itself in the marketplace?

KEN: I see three areas that Sun differentiates itself from competitors. First, the products that Sun has today. Second, the know-how that Sun has gained during the past nine years of working on consolidation. Finally, the partners and ISVs that Sun brings to the table.

IC: Tell us about the products part of that equation.

KEN: Sun started working on consolidation very early, and it's been able to evolve products that incorporate distinguishing design points. Sun looked at consolidation from both a hardware and software perspective to develop specialized products. Not all servers are going to deploy the same way. When you look at today's commodity products, the strategy is to make the best generic server that can run any application and be placed anywhere in an architecture.

Instead of offering products that are differentiated by design, Sun's competitors simply have smaller or bigger servers, but from one server to the next, they pretty much contain the same components. While that's great for driving high unit volumes for the vendor, it doesn't mean that the server is going to be the best product for a customer.

IC: Describe how Sun's servers are specialized for different tasks and environments.

KEN: Sun has three different chip technologies, each aimed at different markets. There is the chip multithreading (CMT) processor, which is focused on horizontal, highly scalable loads. There is the AMD Opteron processor, which delivers improved performance, lower costs, and the industry-standard x86 chip architecture. Then there are UltraSPARC chip-based systems for high-end, massively vertical scalability. Sun has specialized its offerings quite a bit on the hardware side.

IC: Are there any Sun servers that are specifically designed to help with Web tier consolidation?

KEN: The CMT-based Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers are specifically designed to more efficiently handle the massive throughput prevalent in the today's Web tiers. With the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, Sun looked at typical Web tier loads and decided to make the best performance server available. As part of that, Sun worked to dramatically reduce power consumption in the Web tier. Plus, the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 offer chip-level and operating system-level SSL acceleration, which is something that you certainly don't see in competitors' commodity servers. In addition, the Sun Fire x4100 and x4200 servers are suited for the Web tier and offer a high performance balanced architecture that is designed for lower energy consumption and high reliability.

IC: How about on the software side?

KEN: Sun has developed very specific and specialized features within the Solaris Operating System that really help companies realize and manage a consolidated environment. For instance, with Solaris 10 Containers, Sun actually built virtualization capabilities into the operating systems for free. Customers don't need to add any kind of product like Virtual PC or VMware to virtualize their environments. Virtualization is part of the operating system, and companies can immediately begin to take advantage of its ability to help consolidate an environment.

IC: Where does Sun's nine years of consolidation experience factor in helping customers?

KEN: Over the past nine years, Sun has developed a bunch of tools that help customers consolidate more effectively. And Sun has taken a lot of the tools that it has developed for internal and external consolidation projects and released them so other organizations can benefit from them. Specifically I'm talking about the consolidation book, white papers, and some newer tools, including the power consumption tool, the data center simulator, and the consolidation tool for the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers.

IC: How does Sun's global network of ISVs and partners assist customers with consolidation efforts?

KEN: Many of our partners are being trained both in the consolidation methodology that Sun uses, and they are given access to the tools and products that Sun has developed. Sun works with a lot of ISVs to make sure that they understand where Sun is going with consolidation, so that their technologies and pricing schemes fit the Sun architecture model.

IC: It would seem that Sun Services also has a role to play.

BILL: Aside from the particular technologies, Sun Services brings its own approach and methodology to Web tier consolidation. Sun Services doesn't simply walk in and present a solution based on a generic platform. Sun has spent a lot of time with customers reviewing the business drivers that are prompting the desire to consolidate. In the past, most of the consolidation opportunities started as a cost-driven discussion. But, over the past few years that impetus has been diminishing, and today cost almost takes a backseat to business agility, quickness to market, and the ability to deliver new functions, features, and services. Along those lines Sun services works with customers to optimize their infrastructure in a manner that responds to all the business drivers.

IC: Taken as a whole, what does a Sun engagement for a consolidation project look like?

KEN: Sun uses four basic steps for all of the consolidations that it performs, and while there might be a little variation in what a customer does in one of the steps, the overall process remains the same. First, Sun hosts a consolidation workshop, where Sun tries to define the project, understand its goals, and scope the effort required. The consolidation workshop involves sitting down with the customer and talking about the goals and the areas that make sense to target.

IC: What's the second step?

KEN: Then a customer goes through a business justification phase, and often this is devoted to understanding the total cost of ownership reduction by doing the consolidation. Other times, however, customers might have additional business justifications for consolidating. For example, a company might want to move the Web tier off-site. The business justification covers the cost issues and the strategic goals, so the technical personnel can take a definitive plan to the executives and the business people in order to sell the consolidation plan internally.

IC: And the third step?

KEN: From there Sun tries to develop a consolidated architecture, and this is where Sun starts to talk about the products and technologies that best fit the overall environment. There are all kinds of different areas that require a various approaches to architecture, but the important thing is to develop an architecture that delivers on the business justification.

IC: And the final step?

KEN: Step four is to actually implement and help customers manage the architecture. Once a customer has developed an architecture, implementation tends to be one of the easier parts of the process. However, management is more complex. But it's just a matter of taking the time to do it right.

IC: Can you provide a real-world example that highlights some of the benefits of consolidation that Sun has helped a customer realize?

BILL: Sun is currently working on a consolidation project with a customer that has a large environment that includes Wintel, Linux, and UNIX machines. And Sun is finding that by switching them to some of the hardware and software products previously mentioned, the customer is witnessing as much as 60 percent to 65 percent savings in terms of real estate, power, and cooling across the entire environment. Plus, the customer is reducing its Web tier server infrastructure in half. And, on the Wintel side the consolidation is more dramatic — probably on the order of four to one. Even that's a conservative number because Sun is making sure the customer has plenty of room to grow.