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Light as Air

IBM study reveals the System z10 provides a cheaper, easier-to-manage cloud solution.

Editor’s Note: This article is based in part on an internal study, conducted by Scott A. Bain, Fehmina Merchant, Innes Read and John J Thomas.

Today’s economy requires an agile business model, yet many companies are struggling with an increasingly costly and rigid IT infrastructure due to high maintenance, network, operational and management expenses. As a result, line-of-business units are beginning to go outside the data center to public cloud providers like Amazon hoping to lower costs and improve responsiveness.

To avoid disintermediation, IT must re-invent the data center and move toward a more Dynamic Infrastructure*—one that uses virtualization and consolidation to help improve utilization levels and reduce power consumption, and one that embraces a private cloud model to dynamically provision IT services in minutes or hours, rather than months.

In this article, I’ll examine the total cost of ownership (TCO) for a Dynamic Infrastructure built around private cloud services, comparing it to public cloud alternatives, as well as conventional one-application-per-distributed-server models. The results show private cloud implementations built around larger, virtualized, x86 and System z* servers can be up to 75 percent less expensive than public cloud options over a five-year period and around 80 percent less than a distributed stand-alone-server approach.

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