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Datacenter Consolidation Project

The datacenter consolidation project team is tasked with improving datacenter efficiency by consolidating approximately forty datacenters.  Through consolidation, virtualizing, and modernizing existing, older equipment, a significant reduction in the need for air conditioning will reduce the burden on the University's cooling capacity, overall power consumption will decrease, and building space (previously used as datacenter space) can be returned for use as academic or office space.

Project Drivers

Purdue's power and cooling infrastructures are being strained by the rapidly increasing consumption of those resources by information technologies contained within datacenters at Purdue.  In addition, Purdue is continually in need of additional campus building space for academic and research activities.  To avoid the very large cost of adding more power, cooling, and building infrastructure, the Datacenter Consolidation Project will focus on reducing the need for these resources through the reduction of the number of datacenters on campus and by consolidation of computer hardware through virtualization and modernization of those systems.  These efforts will have the following benefits:

  • Improved system performance relative to energy consumption
    • Virtualization substantially increases hardware utilization while saving up to 90% of the energy needed for a purely physical server implementation
    • Modern server hardware is up to twice as energy efficient as existing, older equipment
  • Reduced datacenter infrastructure requirements
    • Newer servers provide more performance in less datacenter space
    • Virtualization reduces server count by at least ten-to-one and as much as fifty-to-one or more, thereby reducing cabling, rack space, and other datacenter needs
    • Fewer datacenters will allow more focus on improving energy efficiency in those that remain
  • Improved technology reliability and resiliency
    • Virtualization makes computing workloads more portable, thereby allowing areas to move their systems to address planned and unplanned datacenter disruptions
    • Modern hardware is more reliable and capable of automated monitoring and failover

Project Goals

  • Reduce campus datacenters by consolidating the computing resources from approximately forty source datacenters into approximately one dozen destination datacenters
  • Increase the level of virtualization for technology resources in academic, research, and administrative functions
  • Improve the reliability and resiliency of computing resources through collaborative development of datacenters and computer technology and hardware to accommodate the majority of the University's computing needs

Project Direction

An executive committee has been formed to guide the use of a limited funding line provided by the University Treasurer for this project.  The committee will work with campus computing groups to identify, propose, and execute consolidation efforts for individual datacenters.  Those efforts will receive funding from the project based on the level of consolidation and the timeliness of the proposal.  Larger and earlier proposals will likely receive more funding than later submissions.  Ownership of the information technology and datacenter infrastructure involved in the project will be retained by the academic, research, and administrative areas that engage in the effort.

Questions or comments should be directed to: John L. Smith, Jr., Virtualization Manager, IT Systems and Operations, 765-496-1279Call