Many enterprises continue to have mainframe systems at the heart of the IT function, running established mission-critical applications.And much of the needed server consolidation can best be applied to the growing army of Intel-based systems that sit around them.By Martin Banks Consolidation of Intel-based servers is a well-established strategy for reducing the running costs and management of enterprise IT systems.But if IBM has its way, more and more organizations will begin to explore the potential benefits of consolidating servers on the mainframe.At the OS level, you can also control resources with the CPU affinity features, and you can adjust the priority of individual processes with the Linux/UNIX ? command, which changes the dispatching priority for server tasks.

Oracle estimates that human error is the predominant cause of unplanned outages, a compelling reason to adopt hardware architectures that minimize redundancy copies of the software, and the associated DBA overhead.

There are a number of benefits that server consolidation can deliver to the small business owner.

First is that it makes it easier to scale operations up or down.

Indeed, for some applications Linux is arguably the better option.

This opens up an opportunity for IBM, the dominant mainframe supplier, to exploit the capability of its z Series machines to run Linux as a native operating system, as well as to run partitions in which multiple virtual Linux servers can be mixed with existing mainframe applications on the same machine.