Data Center Migration: Reasons To Migrate

In a global economy, remote events can sometimes threaten seemingly isolated systems. If your infrastructure lacks single points of control over virtualized, geographically dispersed servers and storage, you run a greater risk that your business will suffer from service disruption. An IBM Server Makeover analysis may help identify the challenges. Moving to a more flexible, integrated infrastructure in which both servers and storage are virtualized can, in one step, deal with many of the challenges to the continuity of your business. It’s hard to overestimate the peace of mind that comes with implementing a disaster recovery system built around IBM automatic systems failover and virtualized storage technologies.

If you’re encountering sudden business growth or trying to absorb a merger, having a flexible infrastructure is not just critical — it’s an urgent imperative. All the time and money you spend on juggling workarounds could be better spent deploying an integrated IBM infrastructure that responds quickly and automatically to workload and storage demands, often with no human intervention.

If you’ve jammed servers and storage in every available spot in your data center, where should you put that next server or storage device? In a new data center? Probably not feasible because building a new data center is expensive, not to mention time-consuming. Instead of adding more servers, look into server and storage virtualization. By breaking out of the single-workload-per-server lockstep, you may be able to avoid new construction and, instead, retire a lot of the equipment that’s currently filling up your data center. And IBM Global Asset Recovery can help you find an environmentally (and financially) friendly way to dispose of old equipment.

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There’s no end in sight for increases in the unit cost of energy. No wonder power and cooling comprise a large and growing percentage of the total cost of ownership. Still, even in the face of these cost pressures, you have the opportunity to cut your monthly IT energy consumption bill by moving to IBM. By consolidating multiple application workloads to virtual servers in an individual physical machine, you reduce the number of servers, establish a new level of data center power control and make a significant dent in your energy bills.

Management costs for an inflexible IT infrastructure tend to fly under the radar. But the opportunity cost of manual system management is significant. Moving to an automated system can provide immediate savings.

Are you slamming into roadblocks when you try to deploy new applications? The advanced features of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other mission-critical applications offer an unprecedented level of integration. But if your legacy infrastructure lacks a similar level of integration, many of your software’s features may be useless to you. And if your hardware is more than a few years old, you may simply not be able to run the applications you need. As you formulate a plan to deploy new applications, bear in mind that IBM servers and storage technologies are optimized to run SAP and Oracle software solutions in joint IBM / vendor competency centers staffed by hundreds of engineers.

There are better things to spend money on than huge software licensing costs. The root of the problem could be one-per-server software deployment over an excessive number of servers. With a sound virtualization strategy, you can dramatically reduce your server count, and with it your software licensing costs. IBM’s leading virtualization technologies can put you in the ideal position to turn back the clock on your software expenses.

Server sprawl may be straining your current power supply as your data center power consumption grows. But the capital expense of adding power supply and cooling can be enormous. Besides, merely continuing to add power-hungry servers can put you back in the same situation in a year or two, even after a data center build-out. A more cost-effective option would be to reduce your overall power and cooling needs through a strategy that combines many virtual servers on relatively few physical servers. It could turn out that with greater energy efficiency, your current power supply will serve you well for years to come.

Once you start to see a trend toward more downtime and lower performance, you can postpone the day of reckoning, but not forever. Instead of adding another piece of hardware to patch over the immediate issue, take the initiative to solve the larger problem. With the flexibility offered by IBM’s advanced virtualization technologies, you build in availability headroom, and future service actions and configuration changes can take place while your system continues to process your workload.

Are you facing a major technology refresh from your current vendor? What if their upgrade path doesn’t work for you? If your system is no longer supported, you’re taking a significant risk. Aging servers may prove a serious drag on business growth. Software compatibility could quickly become a major issue. And perhaps most importantly, if a vendor is forcing an upgrade by ending support now, what’s to keep them from doing it again in a few years? You can count on IBM to provide a roadmap that doesn’t leave you stranded.

You fought the good fight. But duct tape — and your famous ingenuity — can only take you so far. When your infrastructure is showing its age in frightening new ways, you’re ready for a change. Instead of patching your system, why not get one with all the flexibility you need? A leap in efficiency could help propel you from the person who fixes broken IT to the person who helps grow your company.