Common sense tells you that getting off your mainframe is a smart move.  Over the years we have found that there are many IBM Mainframe customers that are 'stuck' in their current system, especially if they are running a smaller mainframe rated at under 100MIPS.  This seems to be most prevalent in enterprises or government agencies where dependence on continuous system operations has kept them from changing.

I have been watching deals begin to come in from the field and channel partners, and I must say that there are many enterprises out there looking to improve on their existing legacy Sun SPARC environment.  The are excited abou the new Integrity blades offering which have recently come out, which cover the breadth of computing needs from the low- to the high-end.  Take a look at how HP Integrity servers deliver the first mission-critical converged infrastructure and at the high end how  Blade architecture halves footprint of HP Superdome systems.

I went out and ran another total cost of ownership scenario that tool legacy SPARC servers and migrated them to Integrity Blades, using the Alinean BladeSystem migration tool.  I had the existing legacy Sun SPARC environment as the starting point. The tool has those systems all running SPARC III or SPARC IV servers, typical of the enterprise looking to do a tech refresh to support future growth. 

The setup was as follows:

2 x 144 core high end SPARC server, 4 x 32 cored midrange SPARC server, 12 x 4 core low-end SPARC server (total SPARC cores = 464)

The tool came back with the following target environment:

2 x HP Integrity BL890c i2 1.73GHz 24MB cache servers (total core = 64)

That is a pretty amazing result.  The number of cores would be reduced by 86%.  3-year Cumulative TCO Savings would be $20.2 million.  The ROI would be 2711.5%.  Check it out yourself; the results can be repeated.

Now, I have heard the argument from several others that those kinds of results could be seen if you moved from old SPARC to any new, modern platform.  Well, maybe, and maybe not.  What we are talking about here is moving to the world's first Mission Critical Convergec Infrastructure. That means that the savings is coming from more than just faster hardware and lower software license costs.  It comes from the creation of a pool of hardware, storage, networking and software resources all managed from one pane of glass.  Workloads are not just virtualized, but in actuallity managed within a pool of resources.  It is pretty exciting to me to see HP take the next step in IT infrastructure. 

I am pretty excited about the new legacy-server-to-Blades tool available on our TCO Challenge site.  It includes the new servers introduced by HP.

The tool will show you how much you will save by moving off your old based RISC servers onto HP Integrity Blades.  This is a very simple but powerful Alinean, Inc tool where you some great results.  We've also been able to incorporate some of the cost improvements you should see when moving to a Converged Infrastructure. 

Please feel free to dive in to see how much you could be save by moving to HP.

I am trying my hand at blogging – this is my first entry and I thought I would talk about two favorite subjects – Customer Business Needs and Total Cost of Ownership.

 My name is Brad Porter and I have been working in and around enterprise servers for almost 18 years, mostly on the marketing side.  It’s been exciting for me to watch the emergence, growth, and maturity of the UNIX server market over the years.  Now it’s Linux, Windows, and UNIX on enterprise platforms and even the definition of enterprise servers has broadened.  

 And things are different from my early days at HP.  At that time customers would get really excited about buying HP9000 K-Class and T500 servers to meet their IT needs.  Those were the best machines out there,  helping transform businesses in remarkable ways.  

 Many of those customers in the mid-90’s were used to running old minicomputers with costly packaged, proprietary software and operating systems.  They wanted to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and at the same time move to open, standardized systems to drive enterprise growth and provide flexibility.    

 Fast forward to today.  The world is emerging from the biggest recession in over 50 years.  Many feel it is time to implement new business models on reliable, mission critical infrastructure. So the need to drive out cost and enable growth hasn’t changed from 20 years ago.  CIOs are still looking at buying IT infrastructure that makes them more agile and responsive.  But in today’s economic environment, everything has to be tied to revenue, growth, and business operations.  

It’s all about lower TCO – I guess things haven’t changed that much.   In fact, take a look at the TCO Challenge to see how you could save by moving off your 3-7 year old proprietary servers to modern, up to date HP Integrity systems.  Kick the tires on this tool and you’ll see some results that will make you want to move today.