Network redesign through servers consolidation

In this paper, we have described a redesign methodology for an existing network in the educational system of 6--9 levels in the State of Kuwait, through servers consolidation. We have examined a typical school network, where the installed five servers are underutilized by more than 44% of the time. The redesign methodology operates offline by taking a snapshot of the existing network with its clients, servers and their interconnections and workloads, and translating them into a model to be manipulated for better performance with the reduction of number of servers. Our technique searches for the best possible ways to consolidate the existing servers, while maintaining an acceptable performance and increasing the utilization of remaining servers. The initial experimental results show improvement in the utilization from 44.2% to 73.61% for a network originally comprised of five servers serving 40 clients and consolidated to three servers.