Dell and RISC Migration Solutions

Moving from proprietary RISC servers to industry standard servers has many potential benefits. From similar or better performance and better price/performance, to reduced total costs of ownership, to increased flexibility and reduced complexity - minimizing RISC is a great way to simplify IT and bring additional value to your organization.

Performance of today's Dell^TM  PowerEdge^TM  servers is outstanding and often exceeds similarly configured RISC-based servers. In today's budget-conscious environment, raw performance is usually much less important than price/performance, or "bang for the buck." That's where PowerEdge servers can dominate RISC-based competitors. For example, in recent benchmark testing, the $31K Dell PowerEdge R900 server with 4 Intel^®  Xeon^®  X7460 processors bested the performance of a $500K+ Sun Fire^TM  E4900 server with the same number of processing cores (24).^*

This same PowerEdge R900 was within 1% of the performance of the $173K Sun SPARC Enterprise^® T5440 server with the same number of processors (4) and more processing cores (32).^* That's a 4.5X to 20.4X price/performance advantage for PowerEdge R900 servers vs. similarly configured Sun RISC-based servers. And in recent third party testing, a PowerEdge R900 running Oracle® 10g R2 Enterprise Edition on Solaris^TM  10 achieved 13X greater performance than a Sun Fire V440 running Oracle 9i Enterprise Edition on Solaris 9.^*

There are 3 cost saving areas that RISC Migration can deliver:

Capital Costs: Costs for hardware can be significant, and as shown above, costs for similarly configured and capable PowerEdge servers can be significantly lower than RISC-based equivalents. In addition, costs for related storage and other hardware are typically less with industry standard servers. Data center cost efficiencies can also be realized, as the replacement of aging and less energy efficient RISC-based servers with new, more energy efficient, and often fewer, PowerEdge servers can help avoid or reduce data center expansion costs.

Operating Costs: Operating costs are the area where RISC Migration can have the biggest benefits. The costs to manage and maintain RISC-based servers can be extensive: System maintenance alone may be more expensive than the costs to replace the servers; software licensing is often lower on industry standard servers; staffing for RISC server skills can be more costly; and, as noted above, RISC-based servers are usually less energy efficient and require higher data center costs. Reductions in all these areas may be possible with a migration from RISC servers to Dell PowerEdge servers.

Opportunity Costs: In addition to the hard dollars of capital and operating costs, there are other costs to maintaining a RISC server environment. Retaining a RISC environment in addition to your industry standard environment adds complexity, as multiple platforms, software versions, personnel skills, and policies must be maintained. Flexibility is reduced with RISC-based servers, with limits/lock-in on the vendors, operating systems, applications, and services available for that platform. And technology advances often pass the RISC vendors by, as the development cycles and R&D are not as robust as those with industry standard systems. Migrating from RISC servers offers the ability to simplify, enhance flexibility, and keep up with technology, and can deliver costs savings and value to your organization.

With all the benefits and cost savings potential, it's surprising that some organizations still haven't migrated from RISC. They believe the challenges of the migration outweigh the future advantages. As thousands of Dell customers and many others have found, this approach is no longer valid. There are guides, best practices, and services to help organizations of all sizes and skill sets successfully migrate from RISC-based systems to Dell PowerEdge servers.

Dell has been working with leading vendors such as Oracle and SAP for many years, helping customers make the move to industry standards from RISC-based servers. Dell is one of the leading providers of Linux solutions and now offers Solaris 10, with Dell support, as an excellent choice for customers wishing to stay with Solaris as they move to PowerEdge servers. Dell provides a range of pre-sale engineering validation and configuration assistance as well as services to scope, plan, and implement your RISC migration. Dell recently commissioned the creation of step-by-step migration guides to assist customers with their RISC migration projects. See the Services section and the Migration Guides in the Resources section of this web page.

Performance and Price/Performance; Cost Savings and Opportunities; Expertise and Assistance - there are so many ways that RISC migration and Dell can help IT organizations deliver more value. What could your organization do with a more nimble, less complicated, reduced cost environment? Take a look at migrating from RISC-based solutions to Dell PowerEdge based solutions.

Call your Dell account rep or services rep today for more information on Dell's RISC Migration products and services.