RedHat Whitepapers
In today’s economic climate, everyone’s feeling the pressure. No industry is safe. And no one can comfortably predict just when things will turn around. The challenge is especially great for your IT department: you need to figure out how to cut costs while keeping pace with ever-escalating demand for IT-supported business transactions. Read more.
The global economy is driving competition at an ever-increasing rate, forcing enterprises both small and large to work as cost-effectively and efficiently as possible. To reduce costs in the datacenter, many IT managers are moving to commodity x86-based servers to replace their legacy RISC servers, such as those based on Oracle SPARC processors. Read more.
To increase agility, improve productivity, and reduce costs, many enterprises are moving away from proprietary platforms to a more standardised IT infrastructure and automated processes like service provisioning and private clouds. Read more.
This paper examines two case studies where organisations were recently faced with application upgrades. In both cases the organisations needed to upgrade aging systems to accommodate increased workloads and to take advantage of functional enhancements in the latest releases of packaged applications. Both organisations found that by migrating they could cut their costs by more than half compared to upgrading to newer versions of UNIX/RISC platforms.
Companies originally chose AIX platforms because of the strength of IBM software and the robust platform on which it could run, and that choice served them well. However, in today’s fast-changing business environment, you need a flexible, cost-effective IT infrastructure that is supported on a wide range of servers to handle any workload, from small to large to virtualised cloud deployments. The same advantages, in terms of reliability, security, and performance is available today on a breadth of hardware platforms.
Building a cloud is a highly strategic IT decision. In fact, it’s perhaps the most important single decision CIOs will make this decade. But not all approaches are created equal. Of the three basic models for building a cloud, only one maximises the value of that cloud and the business benefit derived from it. Read more.
Choosing how to build a hybrid cloud is perhaps the most strategic decision IT leaders will make this decade. It’s a choice that will determine their organisation’s competitiveness, flexibility, and IT economics for the next ten years. That’s because, done right, a cloud delivers strategic advantages to the business by redirecting resources from lights-on to innovation. But only an open cloud delivers on the full strategic business value and promise of cloud computing. Read more.
Private cloud enables IT to maintain control and better support critical business initiatives. At the same time, it allows IT to get out of the way so IT customers work at their own speed. This paper, the first in a series of four, offers practical advice for cutting through the clutter and getting started with a private or hybrid cloud strategy that successfully builds on your current data center. Part of the work involves planning. The remaining effort is hands-on.
Cloud computing refers to a convergence of technologies and trends that are making IT infrastructures and applications more dynamic, more modular, and more consumable. That’s a big change that has implications that touch on just about every aspect of computing. This whitepaper aims to make sense of it all for audiences that haven’t been deeply involved in the details of cloud computing as it has rapidly evolved. It lays out the characteristics of a cloud computing infrastructure. It discusses some of the things that cloud computing isn’t, even if they’re often conflated in customers’ and prospects’ minds.