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Identifying Strategies to Simplify IT Transformations

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Technical Research Study

Executive Summary

Prowess Consulting researched and determined tech refresh guidelines for servers and operating systems, including software licensing strategies that reduce costs by up to 28 percent.

The IT Challenge

Many time-consuming tasks, from supporting hybrid work to monitoring security threats, keep IT teams busy—in fact, too busy. Meanwhile, they are expected to innovate to capture the business potential of cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced analytics. To be successful, IT teams need to simplify their IT processes however and whenever they can.

Streamlining IT

Prowess Consulting researched best practices for IT teams looking to streamline operations. Prowess recommends three strategies based on its research and a series of assumptions about real-world IT environments.

  1. Take advantage of tech refresh cycles to upgrade servers. To successfully support modern workloads that have high business potential like AI, take advantage of tech refresh cycles to upgrade servers. Look for servers with higher performance and support for features like PCIe® 5.0 and DDR5 DRAM.
  2. Increase flexibility within enterprise server clusters by deploying a secondary operating system (OS) like Windows Server® 2022. Deploy Windows Server 2022 on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions like Dell™ VxRail™ HCI system software. This selection gives organizations the option of running business workloads like Microsoft® SQL Server® on top of Windows Server 2022. Windows Server 2022 brings benefits like multi-layer security, manageability, and support for Windows containers. Enterprise users looking to deploy workloads in highly virtualized environments and to support unlimited numbers of virtual machines (VMs) should choose the Windows Server 2022 Datacenter SKU.
  3. Recognize the potential of your software licensing strategy to save time and money. When purchasing a server from a manufacturer, check to see if you can purchase your virtualization software and Windows Server 2022 licenses at the same time. For example, purchasing hardware and software from Dell Technologies can lead to savings of up to 28 percent in Windows Server 2022 licensing cost, compared to purchasing licenses through Microsoft volume licensing.