Migrate from Sun Servers

• IBM's higher performance per core and integrated virtualisation technology means fewer servers are needed for the same workload, and this equates to lower software.
• Reduce server acquisition costs by over $400K and save up to 91% of the energy use by consolidating on the Power 550 Express instead of the Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 while using up to 1 / 7th the rack space and up to 90% fewer cores. (5)
• IBM BladeCenter provides more than 25 percent better density than blade competitors, and two times the density of rack servers—which translates into simpler, less expensive interconnects, power and cooling and systems management and can significantly reduce IT costs.
  • Consolidate up to 180 non-virtualised Sun Fire V490 servers into one rack of virtualised IBM BladeCenter JS22 servers.
  • Migrate from Sun servers and reduce maximum energy use by up to 92% and save up to 95% of the floor space.
  • With consolidation and 24 X 7 X 365 operations, the 3-year operational savings should pay for new BladeCenter hardware. (6)
• IBM SAN Volume Controller’s storage pooling can help share capacity among servers, centralise management, and help improve storage utilisation. A recent study of SAN Volume Controller customers by Forrester Consulting found that San Volume Controller can help improve storage utilisation by as much as 30 percent and helps reduce storage growth by as much as 20 percent. (7)
• Even if the migration process is seamless, the question of fiscal support remains—a daunting question at a time when many IT divisions are already budget-challenged. Fortunately, complete end-to-end financing and asset disposal services from IBM Global Financing ensure a quick and cost-effective solution when you migrate from Sun servers. Migration financing delivers access to capital and financing structures that can help minimise project and financial risks. What’s more, project costs can be structured into monthly payment plans that help clients manage cash flow during project implementation and balance operational and capital expenditures. This enables clients to receive the ROI benefits of migrating to an IBM environment more quickly, while also minimising the financial strain on their business in a difficult economic climate.

IBM believes there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ system that can adequately meet the varied needs of today's businesses. Sun clients may have been steered toward Solaris, with Sun offering little or no support for other platforms. When you migrate your Sun servers to IBM, you get the flexibility to choose your preferred platform, which in turn gives you the ability to do more on an IT and business level. IBM supports your choice of platform with a broad range of offerings, service and support for Linux, AIX, Windows, i5/OS, and z/OS.

• One of the primary advantages of working with IBM is an integrated approach that combines the deployment of servers, storage, the IBM Migration Factory for server migration, application and data migration solutions, plus the availability of financing, in one complete solution.
• Power Systems provide you with the choice you need to migrate from Sun servers as they have the capability of supporting UNIX, i and Linux, thereby exponentially increasing the portfolio of business solutions available on a single platform.
• Capacity on Demand (COD) options on IBM Power Systems enable processing power and memory to scale up and down as business needs fluctuate, with no or minimal disruption to business.
• Built on industry leading eX4 technology, System x enterprise servers provide the headroom to scale up seamlessly from 4 to 16 sockets (64 cores), giving you the flexibility you need to respond to fluctuating business demands. IBM is the only tier-1 vendor to support such modular scaling, leading to fewer servers for a given workload, which can help reduce complexity and save on costs when you migrate from Sun servers. (8)
• PowerVM can fire up a new virtual server in hours, versus days or weeks to install new physical servers. Live Partition Mobility helps clients eliminate hardware related planned downtime. You can just move the partition, while it is running, to another server, so you upgrade or maintain your systems without interrupting productive work.
• AIX provides live application mobility for superior workload balancing, using automatic, policy-based relocation of workload between systems using WPARs. Solaris based virtualisation capabilities are significantly less robust than those available with Power Systems, with no support for partition or application mobility and less granular resource allocation flexibility. (9)

• IBM controls its processor roadmap and is highly committed towards the development of its Power processors.
• Power Systems virtualisation technologies may help to reduce your cost of downtime by up to 59% versus a conventional UNIX environment. (10)
• System x enterprise servers are designed with mission-critical features (memory proteXion, memory scrubbing, memory mirroring, Chipkill memory, and hot-swap/hot-add memory) to help deliver customers extreme high availability at an entry price point when they migrate from Sun servers.
• IBM XIV Storage System rebuild process provides rapid self-healing to quickly restore internal system redundancy after the failure of components like disk drives.
• According to a recent Yankee Group study of 400 Windows, Linux and UNIX users, AIX was the most available server operating system. (11)
• The IBM Migration Factory is designed to help ensure that each step of the process to migration from Sun servers is optimised to address all unique organisational needs via a proven, five-step methodology that minimises the costs and complexities of the challenge.

In fact, the Robert Frances Group recently analysed Solaris and Linux and offered guidance to enterprises as they plan their operating system strategy. Their recommendations:

• Unless you are running an application that for technical reasons cannot be on anything other than Solaris, choose Linux. Their position is that with more skilled administrators, a lower total cost of ownership, and a strong, vibrant development process, Linux is the clear choice (15).