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Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution: Opening a path to digital innovation for cloud service providers

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Digital transformation demands an agile infrastructure that is equipped to take advantage of the latest technological advances and modern digital solutions.

Cloud service providers (CSPs) are acutely aware they are at the forefront of this evolution, but many are unable to move as quickly as they would like because they are hampered by proprietary legacy virtual machine (VM) technology and locked into contracts or enterprise licence agreements (ELAs).

Many CSPs don’t want to renew ELAs with their proprietary provider and are looking for a way out.

“Virtualisation technology is 20 years old – the first commercial release appeared when companies were concerned about Y2K and their BlackBerry phones,” says Gordon Tillmore, senior principal product marketing manager at Red Hat.

“It’s purely a utility now and people are thinking, ‘Do I really want to pay another few million dollars for an over-priced ELA?’ CSPs don’t really need to take on that burden any more and are thinking, ‘Why not go to less expensive, commodity open source alternatives?’

“Proprietary vendors are trying to bring their platforms into the new age by layering the latest services on top, such as Kubernetes, or OpenStack APIs [application programming interfaces]. While this may provide the modern integration points, the underlying infrastructure platform remains in the prior age of IT. CSPs increasingly rely on a flexible, hybrid cloud approach based on enterprise open source to fully reap the benefits of modern IT.”

CSPs want to explore open source solutions that promise agility and stability while offering a flexible platform for digital innovation. However, making the shift from a proprietary solution can perhaps appear daunting and resource intensive.

Red Hat understands the challenges around navigating a successful path from an expensive proprietary virtualisation infrastructure to a modern technology platform that avoids disruption or downtime, and provides an on-ramp to open hybrid cloud.

“Organisations are increasingly building innovation platforms based on Linux containers, automation and Kubernetes orchestration. Companies that are saddled with large investments tied to old, proprietary virtualisation footprints can quickly find themselves at a huge disadvantage,” says Tillmore.

Easing digital migration

Red Hat’s Infrastructure Migration Solution combines open source technology, point-and-click migration tooling and consulting services based on years of experience, to enable CSPs to free themselves from vendor lock-in and ELAs so they can migrate to an infrastructure that meets their needs in the digital age.

Easing the transition from proprietary VM technology to a modern platformSwitching to an open source platform can be daunting for cloud service providers, but Red Hat’s Infrastructure Migration Solution enables a successful migration without disruption or downtime

“Organisations are increasingly

building innovation platforms based on

Linux containers, automation and

Kubernetes orchestration.

Companies that are saddled with large

investments tied to old, proprietary

virtualisation footprints can

quickly find themselves at a

huge disadvantage”Gordon Tillmore, Red Hat

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“CSPs are pushing towards digital transformation and looking to be more agile and use technologies such as containers more effectively,” says Karl Stevens, business development manager EMEA at Red Hat. “Virtualisation is old-school stuff and CSPs don’t need to be spending money on it. We can help them release money to spend on digital transformation and innovation.”

The solution’s methodology has three distinct phases: discovery; collaborative pilot workload migration; and finally, CSP-led migration at scale. This ensures that business requirements are satisfied, such as migrating within proper change control windows and gaining necessary stakeholder approvals.

“We help CSPs migrate from virtual machines. Many of them pay for high-end functionality they don’t use. We say there are alternatives that offer cost savings that go to their bottom line, which are easier to implement,” says Colin Fisher, director, EMEA cloud service provider sales at Red Hat.

Once free from ELAs, CSPs can shift investment from proprietary virtualisation to more impactful, transformative technologies such as containers, multicloud management and automation.

The biggest barrier to migration from proprietary products to an open source Red Hat solution is often the mental hurdle of taking the leap. With the introduction of the Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution, this inertia can be overcome.

Taking the first step

The first step is a discovery session that explores and prioritises options and migration targets that will deliver the greatest impact for your organisation.

This no-cost, one-day session brings together Red Hat subject matter experts with stakeholders from across your entire organisation, including business, development, operational teams, and more. The final session deliverables include a high-level transformation strategy document, which provides recommendations, and an initial impact analysis, which can help to guide long-term project success.

“We like to have discovery sessions with multiple stakeholders, including CIOs, IT architects, auditors, developers and systems administrators,” says Tillmore.

Once free from ELAs, CSPs can shift investment from proprietary virtualisation to more impactful, transformative

technologies such as containers,

multicloud management and

automation

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By securing support across the organisation, staff are empowered to achieve success and avoid any risk of a silo project.

“The broader and more inclusive the audience, the greater the success probability for the project. Our goal is to teach the CSP to drive, so to speak, and then ultimately hand the keys to them; that is the point of the Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution. CSPs don’t want an army of consultants with them for years,” explains Tillmore.

“We set expectations, work with them and take the lead for migration, but we teach them how to use the tooling, and say, ‘Here’s the key to the car. Now you drive.’ We will be in the background for support, but CSPs want to save money, and with this solution everyone wins.”

Moving to a new environment

Once CSPs have moved away from a reliance on proprietary VMs, they can adopt technologies such as Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform, making them more efficient, competitive and profitable.

“Until cloud providers use Red Hat technologies, they can’t offer these alternative technologies to their customers. This is what makes the solution compelling – it shows them there is an alternative,” says Fisher.

Stevens says the Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution demonstrates a viable technical alternative that is also a good commercial proposition. “People often stick with what they know because they are used to it, but we have shown that CSPs can realise significant benefits from making the change - more than enough to justify the effort. We have the tools to automate the migration and make it easier,” he says.

Grappling with complex contractual scenarios is no longer necessary because the solution will help a CSP to calculate all the associated costs by factoring in training and conversion costs and any early release fees from ELAs.

Timing is important; the Infrastructure Migration Solution can build in the cost of either an eight-week consulting engagement for a virtualisation pilot or 14 weeks for OpenStack, with training to get CSPs up and running with workloads.

Red Hat offers a VM Migration Savings Calculator to help CSPs identify whether their proprietary virtualisation investment is yielding a suitable return. Highlighting the long-term costs of proprietary VM software can be a sobering exercise.

“Everyone is different, and some have more complex situations than others, but the VM cost calculator can help get a conversation started, and part of the solution is more in-depth analysis,” says Fisher.

Learning from experience

Cloud providers have migrated away from proprietary VM technologies previously, but Red Hat’s introduction of the Infrastructure Migration Solution in August 2018 captured the accumulated experience and intelligence from those migrations – this is what makes it invaluable to speeding up the process.

“The Infrastructure Migration Solution condenses all the experience and helps CSPs with a packaged solution. Before, CSPs would have consulting from Red Hat, but the consultants would leave,” says Stevens. “The difference now is that we have taken the knowledge and experience and packaged it into the solution, which offers tools as part of the product, so when Red Hat consultants leave,

“The solution offers a lifeline to those

cloud providers that are not using all

the functionality of their proprietary

VM solutions and feel locked in”

Karl Stevens, Red Hat

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the CSP still has the tools covered by their support agreement with Red Hat, so they can call us for support.”

Cloud providers can access the CloudForms management solution, and within a menu item, can simply point and click to migrate a VM, once the initial Red Hat infrastructure has been built out. CSPs can do this while running alongside their legacy virtualisation estate, thereby minimising risk and allowing a time frame that makes sense technologically and commercially.

“The commercial aspect is one of the issues that prevents CSPs migrating from proprietary virtualisation solutions because they are tied into ELAs,” says Stevens. “By working with Red Hat and the Infrastructure Migration Solution calculators, and sharing the costs and end dates of their ELAs, they can work with us on the most cost-effective migration timetable to gradually move workloads over.”

This knowledge of how ELAs operate is built into Red Hat’s calculation tool and considers complex factors such as how many VMs are being utilised and the rise in the cost of maintenance in the event of non-renewal.

By incorporating this into the business calculations, Red Hat can work with CSPs in a way that is commercially acceptable because they have full overview of the business case and are forearmed in negotiations with proprietary virtualisation suppliers.

Meanwhile, CSPs can build pilots and develop new skills over the time it takes to be released from ELAs.

“It is critical for cloud providers not to have to rip and replace technologies, so we help them identify when to migrate and they can run parallel environments and migrate when it suits them. The cost cutting and savings are considerable,” says Fisher.

The Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution enables a smooth migration journey and a clear roadmap to move workloads to Red Hat when the cloud provider is ready.

“The solution offers a lifeline to those cloud providers that are not using all the functionality of their proprietary VM solutions and feel locked in,” adds Stevens.

Embracing open source

Once a CSP has embraced the Infrastructure Migration Solution, they can start the second phase of the journey towards digital transformation – the benefits of a proven open source Red Hat infrastructure.

“Anything that a CSP can save from an operational perspective goes on their bottom line. Red Hat technology is rock-steady, enterprise-class technology but a lot of operational costs can be saved. CSPs can look at new technologies such as containers and see where, as a provider, they can offer advancements to their customer base,” says Fisher.

Red Hat offers an open roadmap that doesn’t lock in its CSPs and allows them to run new digital technologies.

“In terms of business benefits, it is in line with the DevOps methodology because developers and operations staff can work within the same paradigm,” says Stevens.

Collaborative practice is enabled and the systems development lifecycle is accelerated with features, fixtures and updates delivered frequently in close

“It is critical for cloud providers

not to have to rip and replace

technologies, so we help them identify

when to migrate and they can run parallel

environments and migrate when it

suits them”Colin Fisher, Red Hat

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alignment with business objectives. This allows CSPs to provide a better service to their customers, as OpenShift container technology on top of Red Hat enables modernisation.

“Application development can be broken up into smaller pieces and functionality can be added more quickly using microservices in containers. This allows CSPs to more rapidly evolve new features and create more business value for their customers,” explains Stevens.

The tight integration between OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux means solutions are easier to roll out with enhanced security. Everything shares common APIs and management tools, which helps to connect systems, share information and unify management.

“Developers want to automate the roll-out of new functionality and build the right connections,” says Stevens. “By having OpenShift on top of Red Hat Virtualization, the calls between the two work well together. You can run OpenShift on top of proprietary platforms, but there can be complications with integration when proprietary interfaces are in play and software dependencies need to be put in place. It is easier to get solutions to run together if they are based on Linux and open standards.”

The introduction of the Red Hat Infrastructure Migration Solution speeds up the journey towards modern digital platforms by offering CSPs a clear migration path from proprietary VM technologies to established, secure and enterprise-class open source Red Hat infrastructure.

Many CSPs have already taken advantage of the roadmap and are enjoying the benefits of lower infrastructure spend. The reduction in costs releases investment opportunities in advanced application development technologies such as hybrid cloud, containers and automation – with the benefits of this digital innovation passed on to CSP customers. n

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