Today fortune 500 companies are overwhelmingly modernising their server infrastructure from legacy UNIX/RISC to Intel Xeon processor-based servers running Linux. Organisations are realising benefits such as lower cost of maintaining and upgrading their mission critical environments and technological and security advancements.
Data from industry analysts shows a distinct trend emerging as organisations migrate their expensive legacy UNIX/RISC infrastructures to the lower cost commodity Intel Xeon based servers. IDC data from 2002 and 2010 shows a decline in server revenue for RISC mainframes from US$30 billion in 2002 to US$15 billion in 2010 and a corresponding increase in Intel x86 sever revenue from US$19.2 billion in 2002 to US$30.5 billion in 2010.
In March 2012, IDC stated that “the RISC UNIX–based computing market has been in decline across the region for many years now, with end users transitioning to x86-based technologies for the lower acquisition and management costs. All UNIX-based operating systems, such as IBM's AIX, HP's HP-UX, and TRU64, have been vulnerable to platform migration.”
Although careful assessment and planning is important to ensure a successful outcome, migration to Intel Xeon processor-based infrastructure offers a foundation for layering advanced cloud functionality and tends to cost less than upgrading existing UNIX/RISC environments.
Elaborating on the achievements of the project Samir Khare, General Manager & Head – IT Business Solutions, Fullerton India said “Though moving from the RISC architecture to the Intel platform provided a saving of about 45%, the bigger advantage is the easy availability of skill sets around the Intel platform. The support environment and the knowledge base available enhances the overall usage experience of the Intel platform and allows for easy maintainability”
