Virtualize Today with IBM Financing

For IT leaders today, the question is not: Do we need a dynamic infrastructure?

It is instead: What is the shortest and most fiscally sensible path to a dynamic infrastructure?

If IT is the central nervous system of the organization, it follows that the more powerful, flexible and scalable IT is—the more dynamic it is—the better the business outcome is likely to be. 

Dynamic infrastructures tend to be highly virtualized. This is because virtualization helps at a basic level by unchaining logical from physical resources and thus allowing processing power, storage, network bandwidth and other elements to be allocated fluidly, whenever and wherever they are needed. As business goals or workloads change in real time, the infrastructure can thus quickly respond to fulfill them.

Unfortunately, a difficult economy, combined with increased competitive pressure, means many organizations may find the initial costs of a major virtualization initiative a serious obstacle.

IBM Global Financing can help. Through sensible financing, the costs of a virtualization initiative can be rendered much more manageable, meaning virtualization can be implemented, and the business benefits reaped, today, not tomorrow. 

IT operations, certainly, will be empowered to fulfill new strategies more swiftly and easily. Furthermore, the overall costs of IT services will fall. This means revenues can be redirected toward higher-priority business goals such as strategic development intended to address emerging customer interests and needs. Customer satisfaction will then climb, and with it revenues, market share and competitive strength—all fundamental aspects of the business bottom line.

Equally important is the fact that via many different options, which correspond to the various aspects of the transition to a dynamic, virtualized infrastructure, IBM Global Financing can not only shorten, but also smooth the road on your organization's journey to a better business outcome. These options can be customized in accordance with the unique context of your organization to create a tailored package well suited to maximize return on IT investment while minimizing financial strain.

Hardware financing
Any major virtualization project designed to make the infrastructure more dynamic is likely to require a substantial investment in new hardware. 

One example of such hardware investment lies in system consolidation, which typically goes hand-in-hand with virtualization. This is because for many distributed environments such as enterprise-class data centers, hundreds of relatively low-end systems may be deployed, often on a one-to-one basis with the specific applications or services they support. These systems typically sit idle 90% of the time or more, generating heat and electrical costs but no business value for their organizations. 

A better result will come by consolidating their workloads onto fewer, more high-performance hosts, and using virtualization to run those workloads simultaneously in parallel. In general, the higher-end the host, and the more workloads it can support, the better will be its hardware utilization and the more dynamic it can be in the pursuit of changing business goals. 

Such higher-end hardware, however, will require an initial investment.

New hardware may also be required to implement virtualization in other mission-critical ways. For instance, storage virtualization can untether storage from specific devices, transforming it into a common pool that can be allocated to any workload that requires it in real time, then returned to the pool when that workload is finished.  This can generate a dramatic improvement for IT service levels, and make the infrastructure far more dynamic. Yet it will also require new hardware to achieve.

In these and other cases, IBM Global Financing is ready to help. Financing is available in many ways: for new hardware, for example, or for IBM Certified Used Equipment that has been tested and certified by IBM as business-ready or for leasing hardware that is only needed on an interim basis.  

The broad range of financing options thus translates into a cost-effective way to obtain the essential hardware you need today to drive service levels up, and risks and costs down, while also achieving enhanced flexibility, scalability and availability.

Software financing
Just as a dynamic infrastructure will likely require new hardware, so too is new software going to play a key role.

Consider, for instance, the case of management solutions—the software used to monitor and control the infrastructure to be sure business goals are achieved, and services are rendered in an optimized fashion. Older management tools, that presume services and applications are deployed on dedicated hardware, will often simply lack the feature set and design assumptions required to capitalize on the full potential of shared, virtualized hardware. 

Most organizations will require new, virtualization-aware software to track system and service health levels, as well as performance against business targets as measured by key performance indicators, in the many virtual servers that now exist on physical hosts. 

For more advanced forms of virtualized infrastructures, such as private clouds, entirely new classes of software tools may be required as well. One example would be software designed to allow organizational end users, who may have no IT background at all, to create cloud-hosted, new IT services via a standard Web browser to test innovative ideas, foster collaboration, or achieve other goals.

Here, too, IBM Global Financing can help finance whatever software elements are needed to make your infrastructure more dynamic in the ways that matter most to your organization. 

Services financing
In some cases, organizations pursuing virtualization may also require special services designed to help them focus more effectively on their core competencies and customers/clients, and less on technical details and complexities.

Imagine, for instance, that in a newly-deployed virtualized infrastructure, one particular complexity of importance is security. Also relevant will be compliance with security-conscious government regulations that specify how the organization should manage and monitor access to sensitive customer information stored in the infrastructure.

Virtualization can—by integrating resources in new ways, and creating new links across technical domains—also imply new security challenges. Yet, many organizations will lack the specific expertise required to address them. Such organizations may in some cases wish to assign responsibility for them to a trusted service provider. 

Similar logic applies to other, different classes of services that may apply to a virtualized infrastructure, such as consultation on the creation, maintenance or optimization of the dynamic infrastructure via logical phases.

How to solve the financing puzzle?
IBM Global Financing is available to help you make the investment in virtualization now, when your organization requires it most, then pay it off in manageable stages so as to get the services you need, when you need them, at a controllable, predictable cost. 

Different financing structures such as flat payments, step payments, balloon payments, and deferrals are available, each with flexible terms, to create a financing plan that corresponds to your needs and anticipated fiscal future.

Lastly, IBM Global Financing can also incorporate into the financing plan related asset discovery/recovery elements involved in a major virtualization project. 

In the case of marketable assets your organization no longer requires, for instance, IBM may purchase some or all of them as part of the plan. And in the case of assets no longer deemed to have significant market value, IBM can work with you to dispose of them in an environmentally sound way. 

By lowering the investment hurdles IT has to jump, IBM can accelerate and simplify your trip to a superior virtual infrastructure and a superior business outcome—ideally, getting you there faster than your competitors.

• IBM Global Financing overview
• IBM IT lifecycle financing
• IBM Certified Pre-Owned Equipment
• IBM Asset Recovery/Disposal