Today’s economic environment is driving many enterprise IT organizations to
consolidate, that is, to reduce the numbers of vendors of different technologies and to
reduce the resources used by those technologies within their data centers. Consolidation
means different things at different levels: it can be reducing the number of physical
servers to run a given workload; it can be combining multiple data stores into a single
larger storage facility; it can be the replacement of multiple applications of redundant
functionality with a single all-encompassing solution. We look here at the opportunity for
consolidation of middleware—Java application servers and related technologies.
Consolidating or reducing the number of vendors of a given technology can significantly
improve efficiency by streamlining operations. For example, if an IT shop has more than
one type of application server, each will have its own update schedule, patching
procedures, and management practices. Consolidating to a single application server will
bring simplification and economies of scale to each of these activities.

Consolidating or reducing the amount of resources used by a given technology brings
near-linear reduction along many dimensions: the labor associated with management
activities mentioned above, problem diagnosis, energy usage, etc. Such capacity
consolidation can be achieved in a number of ways, including use of technologies that
more efficiently utilize underlying resources as well as well as technologies that can be
dynamically scaled with need rather than statically provisioned for the expected worst
case.

Application grid is an emerging architecture for application server-level infrastructure that
is ideally suited for consolidation. In particular, Oracle Fusion Middleware application grid
technologies, including WebLogic Server, Tuxedo, Coherence, and JRockit, provide an
excellent foundation for IT consolidation efforts.

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