Enterprise applications implement business resource management systems, customer relationship management systems, and general systems for commerce. These applications rely on infrastructure that represents the vast majority of the world's computing resources. Most of this infrastructure is lightly utilized and incurs high operations management costs. Server and storage consolidation are the current best practices for decreasing costs of ownership in such environments. However, capacity related decisions about which applications should be placed on a consolidated server are often made informally. This paper presents an approach for automating such exercises. We characterize the complex time varying demands of such applications and then assign them to a small number of servers such that their capacity requirements are satisfied. The approach can be repeated on an on-going basis to ensure the continued efficient use of resources. A case study using data from 41 data center servers is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique.
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