A company currently has offices in four different provinces in Canada and each has a

small datacenter housing approximately 20 physical servers and associated support

equipment. Most of this equipment is now several years old and the company has

decided to renew their IT resources. Because the IT team has calculated that each site

can reduce the number of physical servers to four (4) by incorporating virtualization

technologies the CFO has suggested that all data centers be combined into one and the

other three be converted to badly needed office space. The IT team is not sure that this

is a good move and the director of IT has hired you to respond to the CFOs proposal.

What factors would you suggest the company consider before making the decision to

consolidate the data centers?