Organizations of all sizes understand the importance of delivering faster time to insights, high availability, and data security for their customers. But legacy systems often can’t keep up with the demands of modern analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and other performance-hungry workloads. Older infrastructure is also inefficient and can hinder an organization’s ability to reduce power and cooling usage, making it harder to meet sustainability goals. In addition, dated infrastructure can also be prone to reliability issues and security weaknesses.
Clearly there are strong incentives for organizations to modernize. But how do companies evaluate and compare the available systems effectively to get the most value from their upgrade investment?
To help organizations answer this question, Prowess Consulting identified five key areas that are crucial to consider when modernizing IT infrastructure:
• Performance
• Energy/power consumption
• Security (hardware, software, and processes)
• Sustainability
• Consolidation
We looked at each of these key areas systematically by comparing legacy and modern servers from a popular vendor (Lenovo) built on popular Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. We investigated the benefits of upgrading both the Lenovo® chassis and the integrated hardware components, in addition to the Intel® CPUs powering the systems. Our findings are presented in three sections:
• Performance, including overall performance and performance/power ratios
• Security and reliability, factoring in hardware, software, and process-related considerations
• Energy efficiency and sustainability, from hardware to packaging to disposal
Our research determined organizations that upgrade from first-generation Lenovo® ThinkSystem™ SR650 servers (with 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors) to ThinkSystem SR650 V3 servers (featuring 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors) can achieve significant value while modernizing their IT infrastructures—with improvements across all the key areas that we investigated. The increased energy efficiency of ThinkSystem SR650 V3 servers allows organizations to do more with less to consolidate their infrastructure footprints. A smaller footprint can help organizations meet key sustainability goals while also delivering high performance, reliability, and security. Moreover, you can realize additional benefits through intentional decision making during your modernization journey, such as the energy savings and related sustainability benefits that result from upgrading your CPUs. This is an important strategy for upgrading and modernizing your IT infrastructure.