Saks Cuts Costs With Server Consolidation

Saks Inc. is looking to cut costs through an IT makeover. The $6.1 billion Birmingham, Ala., department store chain is in the midst of consolidating aisles of low-end Intel servers onto IBM's higher-end Intel-based xSeries boxes.

To help customers such as Saks, IBM said last week that it will resell and support ESX Server software from VMware Inc. The software provides an interface through which IT staffs can provision and remotely manage the larger Intel-based servers.

VMware's server-partitioning software is among the first available for Intel systems. It lets companies pull work from numerous low-end PC servers and run larger workloads on higher-end servers running Windows or Linux.

Saks' IT department supports about 350 stores in 40 states. In June, Saks consolidated 26 Intel servers running Windows NT or Windows 2000 onto one eight-way IBM x440 server. Developers had been using the individual servers to write applications, but not all were being used to full capacity. Saks is planning further consolidation.

"You have to get control of your infrastructure costs, especially when you've got Intel servers that are underutilized," says Clint Parrish, Saks' systems architect and lead system administrator. Now Saks can schedule workloads that share virtual servers on a single x440.

The x440 running ESX Server cost Saks about $85,000, around $15,000 less than the combined value of the servers it replaced. Saks expects to save another $3,000 to $4,000 for each server it doesn't have to connect back to its storage system. ESX Server costs $3,750 to consolidate two CPUs.