In the new economy, it is imperative that companies manage costs while maintaining a competitive edge. As companies drive costs out of their enterprise, the IT organization has not been immune from these cuts. Indeed, IT is being asked to deliver more while also being required to slash budgets. As has been documented by many of the leading analyst firms, a majority of the IT budget goes to maintenance – 80% or more in many cases.
By simply cutting the budget with no other changes in applications or operations, the percentage of maintenance approaches 100% of the IT budget (i.e. just keeping the lights on). There is nothing left in the budget to sustain a competitive advantage or adapt to the changing market conditions. Application modernization is a tactic many leading IT organizations are utilizing to reduce overall IT spend while concurrently improving their position in the market in respect to the competition. One of the most straight forward methods of modernization is to move applications (Rehost) from costly proprietary hardware to commodity systems. The advantage to this approach is that the production applications do not change but the savings to run the applications can be quite dramatic and immediate.
Recently, Greg Leake performed a series of IBM written benchmarks. The results of the benchmarks demonstrate a significant cost savings of running WebSphere on Windows on HP Blades as opposed to running the same workload on IBM’s Power 570 hardware. This savings is not only significant but the overall performance in terms of transactional throughput was significantly better than on the Power system. In addition, the tests show the ability to scale the overall system in a granular fashion. The net findings of these tests is that an organization has the possibility to run their WebSphere application workloads on Windows on Intel based hardware for markedly lower costs with improved performance as compared to Power systems.
We will be running a marketing campaign around Greg’s findings – online ads, press outreach, TechEd activities and more. I encourage you to find out more about Greg’s work here. You can find an overview of the work at www.websphereloveswindows.com.