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With the current focus on fiscal responsibility and due diligence, CIOs and IT executives have indicated that more than 80% of current IT purchases require financial analysis for justification.1 This white paper is designed to provide the initial basis for exploring the financial advantages of HP-UX 11i versus other platform alternatives, and empower organizations to consider all costs and benefits to help make better investment decisions. Utilizing TCO allows the decision makers to look beyond just the initial purchase price of the hardware and software assets, which historically accounts for less than 30% of owning and operating typical server solutions over a 5-year period. TCO analysis can help IT make better business decisions by considering the total lifecycle costs and business benefits of a proposed solution. The analysis can be used by IT decision makers to provide guidance and awareness into the factors that contribute to HP-UX 11i and HP Integrity servers being the platform of choice in various project scenarios and competitive situations.
Organizations continue to look for more ways to make each dollar of computing investment go further, driving the continued need for application and server consolidation, reduced management costs, and better availability. On average, over 65% of existing IT budgets are spent on sustaining the existing computing infrastructure, burdened by ongoing IT operations, management, and maintenance costs, while migrations and upgrades consume 25% annually. According to Alinean ROIT? research, only 10% of IT budgets are currently targeted toward innovation and new functions. Reducing data center infrastructure costs can generate substantial savings opportunities for most IT organizations, allowing for fewer investments in computing infrastructure and more on innovation that supports key business strategies and growth initiatives ? by creating a more agile and flexible IT infrastructure (or Mission Critical IT infrastructure).
Today there are many choices of server operating systems and platforms for transaction processing, enterprise applications, and large corporate database applications. All of the operating systems and hardware solutions have been designed with features to help meet the challenges of lowering costs and increasing flexibility. However, each configuration has different costs of ownership and business value, making it increasingly important to analyze in detail the various options, features, costs, and benefits.
This paper analyzes the five year lifecycle TCO of two alternative platforms, considering the costs to plan, purchase, implement, manage, and use two comparable UNIX server configurations for a specified scenario, application, and workload. The comparisons in this study use HP-UX 11i, a UNIX solution hosted on an open system platform using HP Integrity (Intel Itanium based) servers versus IBM AIX 5L running on proprietary RISC-based IBM eServers and quantifies how open systems UNIX solutions running on Intel Itanium servers can deliver higher levels of manageability, consolidation, virtualization, adaptability, security, and availability. As a result, HP-UX 11i running on HP Integrity servers provides substantially more benefits in business critical computing environments and is able to deliver total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of more than 15% compared to IBM AIX 5L on eServer p5 570 servers.
A customer case study scenario was developed for migration of a set of mission critical supply chain management applications from Tru64 UNIX? to a comparative HP or IBM solution. The analysis used competitive platforms, databases, services, available features, and practices to perform as close to a liketo- like comparison as possible. The analysis was complete in its accounting of costs and benefits, considering all direct costs of migrating from the legacy Tru64 UNIX? platform to the proposed HP or IBM solution. Because the solutions are business mission critical, the analysis also considered the indirect ownership costs and business benefit advantages of each solution, comparing downtime costs, security risks, time to market, and business agility.
By examining the TCO and ROI of various installations and scenarios, HP-UX 11i and Integrity servers have been found to significantly help companies reduce the cost of migrations and upgrades, reduce ongoing operations management and maintenance, improve availability, and increase adaptability for business critical computing.
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