When it comes to updating old IT infrastructure, there is a pervasive school of thought that sounds something like, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Certainly, when you have a reliable performing technology like SPARC has been for over 30 years, that would seem to make sense at face value. But when you peel back the layers and examine the current environment – the age of the existing technology, the cost of maintaining and operating it, and the risk of what could happen if it fails – and weigh that against the cost of upgrading, at some point the scales tip in favor of modernization. The ability to streamline costs with an as-a-Service financial model and simplify operations with a marketplace management tool helps to further accelerate the move to modernize.
SPARC has long been a reliable technology that powers critical and demanding applications. As agencies weigh the risks versus rewards of upgrading, they may not be aware that there is an alternative to traditional IT procurement. ViON and Oracle have partnered to deliver SPARC as-a-Service, which can reduce and even eliminate upfront costs, extend a utility-based consumption model that charges only for resources used, and provide significant performance upgrades from older versions. Not only can agencies significantly mitigate financial burden, they are also rewarded with impressive performance upgrades. Compared to previous chipsets, the latest M12 version offers ups to a 4.7x increase in performance and a 60% reduction in cores. In one use case, a customer was able to consolidate from 149 servers to 25 across 2 data centers, with an 80% reduction in core license costs and a 50% reduction in rack space.
The Infrastructure as-a-Service (IaaS) model for SPARC helps get new infrastructure in the data center faster, reduces up-front costs, and allows agencies to pay only for the resources used. But the benefits of IaaS extend beyond a simple financial model. Engagements are supported with aggressive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure high availability and uptime, the confidence of having 24/7 services support and the ease of management, control and reporting from the ViON MarketPlace®.
The ViON Marketplace is a purpose-built governance platform providing automation behind SPARC as-a-Service. It streamlines the process for ordering, acceptance, billing, asset management, event monitoring, incident management and reporting. Customers use this automation platform to create approval workflow for key processes to ensure predictable, repeatable and measurable outcomes. VION collects and unifies data from different sources to provide an integrated view of data center assets, business services and the financial impact of capacity consumed. The data collected is used in dashboards and reports that provides our customers insights into ordering patterns, capacity utilization, approval workflows and service level agreements as well as assets and incident and consumption data.
Today, more than 20 federal and state agencies are using this automation platform. And because this is a customized instance of ServiceNow, hosted by ServiceNow in its Government Community Cloud, our customers get the same FedRAMP High; DoD Impact Level 4 cybersecurity posture.
Modernizing legacy infrastructure may not be the first choice when prioritizing hard-to-come-by IT dollars. But at some point, it will be at the top of the priority list, not by choice, but necessity. There are many reasons to invest today in upgrading SPARC infrastructure and ViON and Oracle have partnered to make it extremely easy to afford and manage. Take the first step to gain a better understanding of how you can benefit from upgrading. Read our white paper, “Modernization Strategy for SPARC Users” and check out our other resources to learn more.