Most organizations think that consolidating IT infrastructure from remote offices to the main data center will cut costs and boost productivity. But a poorly planned project will have executives screaming, users threatening mutiny, and VARs in the hot seat to quickly undo the consolidation. To avoid problems, consider following these five steps for successful IT consolidation.

Step 1: Communicate a change management strategy
In any IT consolidation project benefits are most obvious to the corporation and less so to business units. Users may feel they are losing "their" servers and as a result will experience reduced performance, creating conflict and misunderstanding. Corporations should be clear about benefits which may include:

• Better systems: centralized systems are easier to upgrade and patch frequently.
• Easier collaboration: locating all important data in one place eases sharing
• Cost savings: the company will save money.
• Data security: consolidation reduces the risk of data loss through theft or insufficient data protection.

Step 2: Develop a plan for resiliency
Because IT consolidation makes end users more reliant on the WAN for access to data, VARs need to consider resilience in three main places:

• Backup strategy: consider re-architecting backup plans based on the centralized architecture
• Disaster recovery: use a secondary data center to reduce downtime in disasters
• WAN redundancy: with remote offices more dependent on the WAN to access data, plan for redundant connectivity to reduce downtime during outages

Step 3: Architect a forward-looking infrastructure and support plan
Get key members of the application, storage, networking, and support groups on the same page. It is important to consider the ramifications of consolidation on the entire IT team -- crossing the typical application, networking, and storage boundaries. What applications and technology can you consolidate, and to what degree? Where will you implement WAN optimization or wide-area data services (WDS)? Will you need different shifts to handle IT monitoring?

Step 4: Test branch office performance
End users in remote offices will have serious issues if they cannot access the data and applications they need to do their jobs. Since consolidation of applications and storage will drive more data over the WAN, many will think additional bandwidth is the de-facto solution to performance across the WAN. But additional bandwidth will often not solve the problem -- and is not necessary. Organizations should consider solutions like WDS to address application performance over the WAN.

Step 5: Plan a phased rollout
In considering a phased rollout, explore a few different factors such as:

• How well can you support remote offices in the project's initial phases?
• Which applications make the most sense to consolidate first?
• How complete will the consolidation process be?

The initial phases should focus on offices and applications you can easily support. These offices may have on-site support staff or be relatively close to your IT hubs. Most firms will first consolidate tried and true applications like file servers, Exchange servers, MS-SQL databases, and web applications. Approaches will vary; what is important is that you have thought through the issue with your team and come up with a reasonable plan.

IT consolidation can be a very challenging process. Organizations -- and their IT partners -- that spend time and effort communicating the consolidation plan, implementing redundancy, and ensuring application performance will see tangible results.

Apurva Dave is the director of product marketing at Riverbed Technology, where he is responsible for bringing Riverbed's network infrastructure products to market with its diverse set of channel partners.  Apurva has an MBA from University of California, Berkeley, and an AB in Computer Science from Brown University.  www.riverbed.com