Now days pressure about utilization and decrease of operational costs increase. If you are running bigger Data Center throw years you collected many different systems. Different systems make it hard to maintain (not only the HW but also to administrate many different OS0s).
So, what happened now? Now you can find x86 hardware for less money (cheap). It is powerful enough and it is possible to expand memory. IBM Power is too expensive (in comparison to x86), HP Itanium road map is very blurry (I'll said bad). Operating systems running on that platform became mature and feature lists expand. Also many application now support those OS's. Just to mention some candidates (Linux Debian, Linux Red Hat, Solaris). You notice that there is no MS in list. I will recommend to keep it separately from that consolidation project. You can archive some savings in that are if you virtual some servers (machines).
Start the project, find the candidates and enjoy long term savings.
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