You’ve got a substantial workload running on aging hardware. Eventually that hardware will reach end of life, and before that time you will need to figure out what to do with the applications running on it. You can migrate the workload to new hardware, or you can forego an on-premises deployment entirely and move the workload to the cloud.
If the on-premises workload is substantive enough, it can be more cost-effective over the lifetime of the workload to deploy it to on-premises hardware, such as a converged architecture system, than to the cloud—where periodic costs really add up over time.
Small workloads are relatively inexpensive to run in the cloud, but the economics of high-performance, complex workloads can be more challenging. By purchasing converged architecture to host the workload, you’ll know what the up-front costs will be, and you can reliably estimate the ongoing costs of the workload. Converged architecture also enables organizations to scale up and out should the need arise, but there’s no way to scale back, so there’s the potential to lose money on unused capacity.
With cloud, the size of the bill will drop as the utilization of the workload diminishes. However, it can be much more difficult to estimate ongoing costs. Until a workload has been migrated to the cloud and is actually being utilized, it is very difficult to accurately determine what the ongoing cost of renting that capacity will be. Things get even more challenging if workload utilization fluctuates over each billing period.
Whether an organization should migrate from old hardware to new converged architecture or to the cloud depends on the specifics of the workload. The important thing to realize is that there are no simple answers, and that either choice can be correct.
Underwritten by HPE
Part of HPE’s Power of One strategy, HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers infrastructure as one integrated stack. HPE Converged Architecture 700 delivers proven, repeatable building blocks of infrastructure maintained by one management platform (HPE OneView), built and delivered exclusively by qualified HPE Channel Partners. This methodology saves considerable time and resources, compared to the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach.
Based on a complete HPE stack consisting of HPE BladeSystem with Intel® Xeon® E5 v3-based HPE ProLiant BL460c Gen9 blades, HPE 3PAR StoreServ all-flash storage, HPE Networking, and HPE OneView infrastructure management software, the HPE Converged Architecture 700 can be easily modified to fit within your existing IT environment.
