Server Refresh Considerations

‘Tis the season’.

We have seen a significant uptick in folks looking to refresh their servers. I am sure there are a number of reasons for this beyond the natural aging process of older technology. The workloads that these servers were originally purchased for has certainly evolved with the shifting of workloads to accommodate a growing remote workforce. There has always been a need to support remote workers and it cannot be argued that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption and brought the once nice to have VDI deployments to a more need to have posture.

There is of course a myriad of areas to consider when looking to refresh aging servers and a variety of solutions and approaches available. The intent of this short blog is to stimulate some thought to some general approaches and solutions.

On premise solutions have their benefits from performance, security, control and cost. There are folks that would argue these benefits are found in off premise (cloud) solutions over shadow these. I am not going to address those in this blog but rather briefly touch on a KVM based hyperconverged infrastructure solution from one of our long-time partners Scale Computing.

Scale Computing’s approach is to leverage a KVM hypervisor with a block I/O Engine (SCRIBE) leveraging commodity storage (HDD or SSD), processors, memory and CPU’s (very high level description).

The result is the HC3 stack that can be deployed on the entire product offering of a wide variety of models customized for different workloads. The operational elements of the systems have been thoughtfully laid out to simplify the deployment and ongoing operations. The overwhelming benefits I hear from my clients is:

-Ease of Use

-No Hypervisor Licensing

-Outstanding Customer Support

If you would like to discuss this in more detail – Talk to Tim

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