Businesses today are experiencing more competition than ever. As we operate in a consumer market, it is becoming increasingly more integral to invest in our technology infrastructure to ensure we can remain competitive so when opportunities arise, your business can get the business. Now, we are under no illusions that a commitment to investing in new technology is easy. It is certainly a commitment from the organisation to stay up to date with the latest and greatest. However, taking advantage of new technology means you can work faster and smarter with the ability to expand and scale as required.
“Even with the best foundation, we can’t rest on our laurels; staying up to date with hardware, software, personnel and training is an ongoing requirement. By investing in those four pillars of your organization, a company will position itself to leverage their investment and succeed” – IBM Systems Media, 2020
Some organisations eagerly embrace the latest technology while others delay upgrades to their IT environments. For those late adopters, one of the primary reasons for their hesitation is unsurprisingly, cost. Upgrading to the latest and greatest in technology is widely perceived as expensive, difficult and consequently, harder to justify to company stakeholders. What those organisations don’t understand is that they may actually spend more money by maintaining current and outdated technology. As technology reaches end of support (EOS), you will likely have the option to pay extra for continued support. However, as the years go by, these maintenance costs increase to a point where you are not only reaping the benefits of the newest features in technology, but you may be paying more for less.
“Over time, maintenance costs can increase, and the operational efficiencies of new features and technology advances are often missed since they may only be available with later releases. New technology can actually help reduce cost as a result of greater performance, increased capacity, advanced security, lower infrastructure costs and the availability of new hardware and software features” – IBM IT Economics Consulting Research, 2019
Further, the ‘costs’ associated with maintaining technology transcends beyond the up-front financial investment. There is an operational cost associated with maintaining older versions of technology. Newer technology can strengthen your security and DR posture. Advent One have implemented solutions for large IBM POWER clients who have then been able to perform full DR transition, from Production to DR, in under 15 minutes. We have worked with customers to deliver true 24×7 application availability with no outage for backups, zero day to day management of your HA/DR solution, fast, reliable and fully automated fail-over to DR, together with a significant reduction in CPU resource utilisation, by using storage-based replication technologies. Similarly, staying on old or outdated releases of technology means that if something goes wrong, the problems will compound. Once you have reached EOS, it is not only much more difficult to get the required support to fix the issue, but then it is also harder to upgrade your tech when components of your environment are out of date.
Recently, IBM announced EOS for their POWER7 technology, prompting many to start thinking about their migration plan to POWER9. We have been working with our customers to do the same to ensure a seamless and fast migration while modernising their environment to meet tomorrow’s business demands. If you are thinking about upgrading your POWER system technology, contact us today for a chat. As an IBM Platinum Business Partner, we have worked with IBM since our inception, now twenty years ago. We are highly experienced and familiar with IBM technology and work alongside our customers to ensure their environments are fast and effective. We would love the opportunity to help your organisation achieve maximum success.
Contact us today for a free, no-strings conversation around your POWER environment. Learn more: https://hi.adventone.com/ibm-power/