EXPERT RESPONSE
You are right to be concerned about power. Today's servers do consume more power when compared to servers from several years ago. But the good news is that they provide greater performance options. First, you should confirm exactly how much power you have available in your server location. Is it a single 20Amp 120V circuit, a single 15Amp circuit or multiple circuits? The amperage can be found by looking at the circuit breaker in the breaker panel for that outlet. You should also find out what other outlets are on the same circuit. If your new servers do draw more power than the servers they replace, you may also want to consider the cooling or air conditioning for your servers.
Depending on the load on your current servers, one or two Altus 1U or 2U servers might be able to handle the load. You might also want to consider a blade platform like BladeRunner, which would provide similar CPU performance, but with lower power usage per system. You also gain some integrated management features, redundant power and networking options with BladeRunner.
When considering what services to consolidate, recognize that to maintain performance you will need as much memory in the new server as the *sum* of the servers it replaces. If your database has grown over time, you may also want to "upgrade" the amount of memory provided to that service.
Whenever you deploy a new server to replace an old one, be sure to thoroughly test the new server and configuration before putting it into production. Make backups of your production servers and services. Restore those backups onto your new servers and build a test network to verify that the new servers work correctly. Testing of the new configuration is the most important thing you can do to make the migration go smoothly. After you complete your testing, you'll need to repeat the process to get a copy of the most recent data from your production servers during scheduled downtime for your changeover. Be sure to keep the old servers available for a couple of weeks or so in case you have to roll-back the change due to some undiscovered fatal issue.
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