IBM Power Systems are large, powerful and expensive bits of kit. If you’ve ever had to build a business case for making this kind of investment, you’ll know how challenging it can be to get signed off. This is why it can cause such a headache when your existing IBM Power estate reaches capacity: how do you keep up with ever-growing demand from your business, when you can’t get the budget you require to expand the estate?

Freeing up capacity on your IBM Power Systems

Thankfully, there’s a way to create the headroom you need, without buying more Power Systems. It involves re-architecting your platform, both technically and commercially. This approach is a highly cost-effective way to release significant capacity on your IBM Power Systems – as much as 50% in some cases. Moreover, it can free up considerable space in your SAN storage pool. Consequently, you create room for the additional large-scale or AIX-only applications your business is demanding. Equally, if you’re running Power Systems that are reaching end-of-life, alongside current models, freeing up space on the newer ones means you can move applications across from the older frames. This then enables you to decommission the costlier legacy environment.

Better performance

Re-architecting delivers other benefits besides. By reshaping your estate in line with our proven blueprints, we can improve overall performance of the applications running on your Power Systems. We can also help deliver affordable high-availability.

Self-service databases for streamlined operations

Re-architecting your environment can enable you to deliver true self-service ‘Database as a Service’ (DBaaS) and ‘Data as a Service’ (DaaS). This means your teams can quickly create correctly configured databases for new applications, as well as production database clones for development, testing, reporting and other non-production uses. This on-demand database and data ability can streamline operations right across your business.

Cloud flexibility

Another benefit of re-architecting is the flexibility it gives you when moving to the cloud. Remaining on AIX or any big Unix operating system will massively limit your choice of cloud providers. Instead, by shifting selected parts of your estate onto a Linux operating system, you’ll be able to integrate these elements seamlessly with any major cloud provider, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Oracle Cloud. This will mean you have the option to further shrink your data center footprint, by moving non-production environments, such as development, test, backup, DR and reporting, to your choice of cloud vendor.

Cut your Oracle licensing costs

Licensing is always a major part of any technology budget. Our commercial team has unrivalled experience of how Oracle licensing works, meaning we can architect you a better deal and secure approval from Oracle on your behalf.

Our commercial re-architecture approach frees up licenses , which you can then use for other purposes. This could include taking advantage of Oracle Cloud, additional Database options or extra processor cores for improved performance.

Time to re-architect your IBM Power Systems

Remember, all of these benefits are in addition to the main aim of this re-architecture work, which is to free up valuable capacity on your IBM Power Systems and SAN pool. Because by releasing this prime technology real estate, you can decommission costly legacy IBM Power Systems, and/or meet your business’s demands for new large-scale or AIX-only applications, without the significant investment required to buy new IBM Power Systems.