With enterprises often struggling with the Digital Transformation journey, CIOs need to consider how best route to a successful migration.
According to research from Gartner only 11% of available IT budgets are used to implement technology systems and enact new business models, what Gartner refers to as ‘Transform’. This is in stark contrast to start-ups or ‘cloud born’ companies that invest upwards of 50% of their budgets in transformation initiatives.
CIOs who want to improve their organisation’s bottom line have to make important decisions and make Digital Transformation a reality. It’s clear that businesses need to deliver better and more holistic experiences to customers through digital channels in order to succeed. Even the World Economic Forum is publishing White Papers on the Digital Transformation of Industries.
However, change isn’t easy and organisations often struggle on their Digital Transformation journey in fundamental areas. Limited budget, employee pushback and lack of expertise are all among the top five challenges to Digital Transformation.
The ability to fund transformational projects is one of the most pressing concerns for CIOs. Many organisations lack budget for transformational projects because a large amount is allocated to existing technologies.
“Long-term commitments with proprietary vendors lead to spiralling costs with only incremental gains in capacity. What’s worse, money spent on these long-term contracts only deepens dependence on a single vendor,” said James Labocki, director of Product Management, Red Hat.
“Proprietary solutions are limiting potential in the IT department, the company balance sheet and even individual careers. Limited potential means limited ability to innovate and compete.
“Organisations need to analyse their current IT infrastructure spend to find areas that can be treated as a commodity. One area includes commoditising virtual infrastructure. The current scale-up virtualisation solutions provided by vendors are costly and provide no path for customers that wish to explore future hybrid cloud strategies.”
Red Hat has just announced a new offering, Red Hat infrastructure Migration Solution to help organisations combat this.
Here we ask Labocki questions about the product.
When we talk about migration, many professional organisations are in difficulty. What are the typical customer requests? What are the main advantages of the Red Hat solution?
Often, customers are struggling in two areas. Firstly, they are struggling to deliver new services to market faster because their current IT – including application architectures, the platforms they run on and their processes and culture – slows them down.
Secondly, they are having difficulty in changing their current IT because it consumes so many resources in the form of people and money. The Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution enables customers to reduce the complexity and cost of their current infrastructure so that they can transform their applications, platforms and processes to deliver new services to market faster. Customers can save up to 50% on their infrastructure costs and these savings can be used to develop new container-based applications.
In many environments, proprietary virtualisation architectures have been developed. In this case, how is it possible to take action using the Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution?
The Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution provides comprehensive tooling via Red Hat CloudForms, a cloud management platform, which allows customers to discover all of their existing virtual assets within their existing virtual infrastructure without agents.
Once discovered, customers can build migration plans through an easy-to-use interface. CloudForms then uses Ansible automation to automate the conversion of thousands of virtual machines concurrently between the existing virtual infrastructure and KVM-based virtualisation provided by Red Hat Virtualization or Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
How does the ‘discovery session’ phase work? The analysis of previous activities can be complex so how do you develop a study plan of the client’s structure?
Red Hat’s professional services team has deep experience in migrating customers workloads safely and with availability that meets the needs of the customer.
For example, Red Hat helped successfully migrate Intermountain Healthcare, a large American healthcare provider with more than 35,000 employees.
The services team’s discovery session is where Red Hat services works closely with the customer and this helps the customer to understand exactly how a migration can be performed taking into account both business and technical requirements.
At the end of the discovery session the customer receives documentation that explains how the migration could be performed and the business benefits that would be realised along with how the business benefits would help customers accelerate their Digital Transformation initiatives.
What results have you achieved through internal tests or actual migration cases? What are the improvements achieved regarding management costs, process efficiency and automation?
The Red Hat infrastructure Migration Solution has been used successfully by customers to successfully migrate over 100,000 virtual machines. The recently released migration tooling allows for parallel migrations so that thousands of virtual machines can be converted quickly. One customer, for example, reported an order of magnitude increase in migration performance when compared to previous migration tests.
