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The typical data center is facing a series of shortages due to the failings of an old, legacy infrastructure that controls both the mission- and business-critical applications that drive the enterprise. The total cost of ownership (TCO) of this proprietary UNIX environment is putting a strain on the operational budget of the data center. Unfortunately, combined with a surge in the growth of corporate data, the legacy platforms powering the mission- and business-critical applications have been driving up the operational costs of the data center due to lagging performance, a lack of flexibility, inefficient floor space utilization, and excessive power consumption. This forces the IT staff to review the paradigm of legacy data center operations.
In an effort to modernize, most enterprises have already deployed a network of open systems plat-forms to better handle infrastructure and other applications. Now the TCO for mission- and business-critical applications - including maintenance, administration, software licensing, staffing costs, as well as power consumption and floor space - is leading the enterprise to change the paradigm of its data centers. A choice needs to be made: either upgrade the existing legacy servers to a newer proprietary platform; or migrate the legacy environment to an open architecture, typically through the deployment of Intel-based servers with an open Linux operating environment. Many proprietary shops have al-ready made the decision to deploy on open systems with Linux and have seen the successes of these efforts. For them, the only questions that remain are which platform and which operating environ-ment? For others yet to make this decision, their questions include not only which platform and which operating environment, but also what applications, when, and how? In order to make the decision easier for the IT staff, Dell has teamed-up with Intel and Red Hat, and developed a migration strategy to simplify the consolidation of the enterprise data center from an outdated, proprietary architecture to easily managed open systems platforms running on Dell PowerEdge servers based on Intel Xeon processors and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To learn more about how easy it is to migrate from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Dell PowerEdge servers, please read on.
TCO Issues in the RISC Data Center
The enterprise data center populated with a variety of proprietary UNIX/RISC servers is rapidly approaching a crossroads. The IT staff can try to limp along by throwing money at an aging, perhaps obsolete, architecture in the face of budget reductions. Or, they can migrate away from the legacy platforms that have been the backbone of their mission-critical environment for decades. Can the new Intel-based open system platform provide them with the performance they need with the reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) that their proprietary servers have been delivering?
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