In this day and age of winning by differentiation, speed of delivery matters a lot, especially if you are a startup or an SME trying to stay afloat in a challenging market. Small and medium businesses may not realise that by neglecting their legacy IT infrastructure, they compromise on both performance and service delivery.
Today, SMBs are moving toward virtualisation and cloud options, as well as a more secure and compliant IT environment. By replacing legacy technologies, businesses can maximise performance, security, and compliance with new capabilities found in the latest hardware and software. It further allows them to capitalise on new business opportunities while keeping their business agile.
Organisations of all sizes rely on servers to support their workloads, and small and medium businesses are no exception. It is thus important to understand why they need to upgrade their servers and what the top considerations are.
Do you really need an upgrade?
When talking about investing in an upgrade, the first thing to understand is whether it is worthwhile to upgrade older servers with new hardware.
It certainly is.
Small and medium businesses need to plan their server upgrades by evaluating their processor and server hardware options to enhance performance, reliability, manageability and security.
Read: Intel launches Intel Core processors with Intel Hybrid Technology
Neglecting a timely upgrade can have a devastating impact on the business. By upgrading to a new processor, businesses can reap the benefits of technologies like virtualisation and the cloud while reducing up-front costs.
Increasing adoption of advanced technologies such as machine learning, deep learning and AI demands enhanced capabilities that can drive next-generation applications. Understandably, the processor of choice must have the flexibility to run complex AI workloads on the same hardware as existing workloads. However, such benefits are not just limited to heavy workloads. Even the day-to-day tasks become easier to accomplish in shorter time frames giving small and medium businesses more time to focus on core business tasks.
Further, small and medium businesses need a scalable platform that can help improve their security posture. Clearly, hardware-enhanced security is a must-have feature that can help prevent malicious attacks while maintaining workload integrity, high availability and encryption efficiency.
Without regular security updates, IT systems will be left vulnerable to threats and place sensitive company data at risk. Also, failure to meet regulatory requirements or the right technical support at a critical time may cost a business far more in maintaining a legacy system than it would to upgrade.
Also, investing in desktop-based file/email servers upgrades easily pays for itself as employees are able to accomplish everyday tasks in significantly less time, making them more efficient and productive.
Keen to extract value from the exploding data streams, businesses are looking for ways in which they can deliver new services and improve TCO across infrastructure assets. Demanding applications such as in-memory analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, high performance computing (HPC) and network transformation require new levels of powerful compute capabilities and massive tiered data storage volumes.
Businesses can modernise their infrastructure and accelerate data insights across AI, analytics, cloud and HPC by exploring Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors and data-centric portfolio. The Intel Xeon platform delivers next-generation capabilities to businesses through a future-ready platform that can serve the hybrid-cloud, data-fuelled era while helping to improve day-to-day operations.
Upgrading the processor has many advantages for businesses that can improve data centre efficiency and reliability to handle mission-critical and data-demanding workloads. It starts with identifying your workload requirements in terms of processor, memory, storage and network. Further, ensure that all security, privacy and compliance requirements are met and evaluate your server’s ability to support your workloads. Finally, evaluate your budget in terms of the cost to maintain the legacy infrastructure versus the cost of the upgrade.
Once you have all your ducks lined up, it will be easy to ensure your business ends up with a server that can handle its workloads reliably and efficiently.
