Why upgrade your IBMi in 2020?

As we get back to work after the winter break and our minds start to turn to 2020 IT planning and investment, we ask the question ” Why is 2020 a good time to consider upgrading your IBMi environments?”.

Traditional migration barriers are getting easier to shift

Not so long ago the idea of migrating or upgrading an enterprise application or storage server would of sent many a system administrator to head for the hills. Thankfully these days migration and upgrading complicated servers with embedded, undocumented code need not be so fraught with risk. But as businesses become more concerned with end user experience, security, vendor compliance and general scalability there seems to be small appetite for out of support/ warranty hardware.

The emergence of in depth data and code analytics software such as Fresche X- Analysis, can highlight and identify complex legacy application code that has historically prevented anyone from touching a hardware migration/ upgrade for fear of Armageddon. Fresche negates this problem with it’s easy to apply reporting tools. Giving you complete documentation of code, data and relationships. This type of transparency gives any migration or upgrading planning complete confidence at the planning & staging process.

Hardware is getting cheaper

There was a time when only a few vendors could satisfy the demand of the multi office, multi national enterprise application and storage marketplace. Today the market is litters with options. IBM, HPE, Lenovo, Dell/EMC, all have various different offerings in this market. And, as we all know, the more saturated a market, the more competitive the pricing becomes. Today entrance servers in this space can cost as much as a mid priced laptop; and all wrapped up with annualised warranties, support contracts and enough service credits to ensure a good nights sleep.

This commodity marketplace is further supported by the introduction of software defined management and sophisticated, highly reliable monitoring tools. This offers a new way to configure and maintain server hardware,eliminating the need for ‘spanner in hand’, on site engineering types, who (on the whole) do not come cheap, given that they typically, do not sleep with the hardware they are responsible for.

This all adds to creating a new world of affordable, ever progressive, hardware. Hardware that does not need dedicated resource, resulting in earlier ROI.

So why is 2020 a good time to upgrade your IBMi environment?

As you’d expect we speak to a lot of IBMi administrators. All desperately trying to ‘ keep the tanker going’ with expensive support contracts from IBM or a 3rd party, replicated back ups and plenty of prayers.

But given the reduced cost of upgrade and the opportunity of migrating without interruption of service, it could be time to see an upgrade as a way to reduce costs of ownership, eliminate security and performance risks and reduce sleepless nights.

If you are looking to reduce the cost of managing your current IBMi environment an upgrade could be the answer. Speak to one of our qualified IBM engineers to discuss migration and get a better grip on overall costs. Call today on 0844 800 7821.

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