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Consolidation in general terms means gathering many elements into one larger unit. This process may be applied to many types of activities, e.g. business, taxation, accounting or computer systems. In computer science, there is a notion called server consolidation. It consists of reducing the number servers used by the corresponding physical hardware. Server consolidation in simple terms means combining workloads from separate machines or applications into a smaller number of systems or applications. There are several forms of consolidation. Heterogeneous workloads from multiple servers can be moved to a single larger server. Multiple workloads may be also combined under a single operation system, reducing OS images. Finally, multiple applications such as email systems or database instances can also be combined into a single system. Consolidation is connected with virtualisation. Server virtualization may be used to mask the details of server resources to users while optimizing resource sharing, since the complex configurations of data, applications, and servers which is necessary for server consolidation can be confusing for the average user and too difficult to deal with. To sum up, a virtualised data storage server or a number of servers can manage and be used by may users. Server consolidation is supposed to be an approach which aims at decreasing the number of individual servers and maximize available resources. In other words, it provides a more efficient usage of computer server resources. This solution can be very attractive for modern data centers. Many data center operators have discovered that they can dramatically reduce their operating costs by consolidating multiple servers into single multi-processor, multi-core servers. Also, enterprises choose this alternative to cut unnecessary costs and maximize return on investment in the data center. Consolidated servers lead to a more efficient management and higher availability of systems.
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