The current economic climate is putting intense pressure on businesses to minimize costs and maximize resources, while increasing performance and service levels to maintain their competitive edge. Companies are looking to their IT vendors to help them through this tough economic period with creative solutions that increase efficiency, drive down costs, and improve their margins.
If you're thinking about adopting or migrating to an enterprise Linux server, here are five things you should ask yourself:
1.
Are you getting top tier support?
With something as important as your business’ IT infrastructure, you want to be confident you’re getting the best support 24/7.
2.
Are you getting the most value out of your vendor relationships?
You've made the strategic choice to use Linux in your environment to host mission critical workloads. That's an important decision, but what about the other challenges you're looking to address in your data center such as physical and virtual machine management, identity and security? Partnering with vendors that provide a broad range of products and services for your physical and virtual environments increases your efficiency and reduces your costs.
3.
What if I anticipate migrating workloads around the data center or into the cloud?
Workloads are no longer necessarily static in the data center, tied to a single physical computer. Technology advances in virtualization and increasing capacity in the cloud means you have real options for maximizing data center efficiency and reducing costs. Are your workloads cloud-ready? Packaging your applications as software appliances — images including operating system, middleware, and application — can increase your agility and significantly ease your transition to a private or public cloud. IDC forecasts the software appliance market to grow to $1.18 billion by 2012; look for a vendor with the tools to help you get there.
4.
Is there a strong software and hardware partner ecosystem around your chosen Linux provider?
When investing resources in adopting a solution, you want to know that it works in your IT environment before you deploy it, and you don't want to be constrained by a limited list of certified hardware or software solutions. Make sure the workloads you want to run are certified on top of your chosen Linux platform, and that the range of hardware and architectures you need, whether x86 or mainframe, is supported.
5. How much does it cost?
Cost varies depending on the solution you deploy. On average, customers who take advantage of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support save 50% on their Linux support costs.
Find out how SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support can help you.
