Today’s technology leaders are shifting management of their IBM iSeries, Linux, AIX servers and Virtual Power LPARs to support rapidly changing infrastructures. Because of this shift, power hosting is allowing teams to focus on innovation, reduce infrastructure costs and meet the growing customer demand for ever higher performance.
We asked Carlo MacDonald, our power hosting team lead, what he sees as the strongest motivators for IT Directors leveraging managed power hosting. From Carlo’s “boots on the ground” perspective, IT departments leverage power hosting in ways that make an impact for their environment – not a one size fits all approach.
Here are a few areas where power hosting can make a noticeable difference.
Older doesn’t mean obsolete
Many of today’s most successful businesses embraced IBM Power Systems technology early on, spending a lot of time and effort in creating custom applications and software to run their daily operations. With the rate of change today, many legacy applications are nearing end of life and support, making platform migrations or upgrades expensive and labor-intensive.
Hosting workloads on managed dedicated servers or virtual LPARs can extend the life of mission-critical applications. This creates a bridge letting IT take advantage of additional support resources while future system and application decisions can be thoughtfully made. In the case of an upcoming migration, hosting your environment can help satisfy best practices for testing new equipment independent from production, which gives IT get a better idea of business needs moving forward.
Filling compliance gaps
Employees and customers expect businesses to protect their sensitive information – end of story. Regulatory oversight and industry standards can make compliance an expensive, never-ending task for IT. Hosting partners in our N+1 data centers follow best practices for data protection and integrity and are, by their very nature, compliant across the board.
Shifting production or DR hosting to a larger, managed data center helps infrastructure and security leaders meet SOX, OIXA, HIPAA and other regulatory standards without the burden of monitoring and managing the hardware, software, patches and network.
Save time and deliver peace of mind to your customers, stakeholders and IT team by taking advantage of our data center’s rigorous due diligence processes.
Variable costs make for uncertain budgeting
Technology directors and managers have always been creative when it comes to making the most out of their budgets. With budgets consistently shrinking, leaders are tasked with being innovative in a climate of reduced capital expenditures. This is no small hurdle when you consider the reputation infrastructure hardware and software costs have for being IT budget monsters.
By leveraging hosting technology for production or DR, IT can shift large server and storage costs to their OpEx budgets. As an added benefit, this model removes the financial burden tied to infrastructure technology maintenance and refresh from your shoulders.
The worst time to test your plan is when you need it
Although difficult in its own right, disaster recovery planning may be one of the easier parts of business continuity preparedness. Ensuring that the recovery objectives are achievable and that the DR environment is performing as it should require a solid plan, testing and support.
Shifting your DR environment to a hosting environment can bring opportunities to collaborate with experts, rely on an expanded skill set and ensure business goals are met through high performing Power workloads and system availability.
The right power hosting partner is the one that takes the time to learn your specific business goals, technology needs and becomes an extension of your internal IT team. How do your contenders measure up?