Today's Internet-like enterprise IT infrastructures have removed the constraints on the physical location of servers and users. In addition ageing technology and lack of distributed IT administrative resources have hastened the move back to a more centralized computing structure for replacement equipment. Now servers are being moved out of the departments and consolidated into data centers. There are many benefits from this approach, as centralized resources can be more easily shared, and the need for expensive provisioning for peak loads in each department is removed.

New technologies such as Blade servers, with improved price performance and high reliability characteristics, have further reduced provisioning costs and minimised the footprint in the data center. Importantly all systems can now be administered and managed physically close to the available administrators. But while such Blade servers concentrate and consolidate the previously dispersed resources they don't in themselves reduce the administrative workload.

It is the Fujitsu TRIOLE strategy, for ensuring business efficiency, agility and continuity by a combination of technologies, virtualization, automation and integration plus a system development methodology, which drives the solution.

Resource Coordinator provides the automation and service flexibility that adds to the hardware and ensures optimum use of all IT resources with minimum administrative intervention.

Resource Coordinator plays a major role in the efficient management and deployment of Blade and other servers and the minimization of administrative load. This significantly adds to the benefits of server consolidation using Blade technology.

Based on the concept of "resource attributes" Resource Coordinator virtualizes the IT and service resources. This enables it to provide visualization of the entire environment based on an n-tier computing model. With virtualization comes the ability for services and resources to be deployed and adjusted automatically based on operational policies. Such policy based provisioning removes major repetitive tasks from administrators, freeing them up for other important work. For the Enterprise this means improved resource utilization, accelerated IT flexibility and reduced human error.

The following example shows the tasks involved with provisioning for a new service or expanding an existing one. Blade servers are arranged in groups with a pool of resources available on demand.

In the above situation the same server resources can be automatically reassigned to different work (repurposed) with no need for additional spare resources. Resource Coordinator provides pre-set, scheduled resource redeployment with rapid changeover of system use using system volumes for booting.

These same functions also make it much easier to consolidate existing services on dispersed servers onto Enterprise servers or Blade farms as server resources can be more easily setup and configured to the required format for each service.

Resource Coordinator takes server consolidation further by providing the tools which enable the administration to be more accurate, simpler and safe ensuring that the business obtains maximum benefit from its server consolidation policy.