Why migrate your virtual infrastructure to Red Hat?

A decision like this isn’t just about infrastructure. It’s about what your infrastructure can (or can’t) do to support the technologies you want to deploy. It’s the difference between choosing the right software for the situation or weighing the tradeoffs of complying with an increasingly expensive enterprise license agreement (ELA).

Think about it like this:
Imagine you’re an IT architect building your infrastructure on proprietary virtualization technology. When your company is ready to adopt new technologies like hybrid cloud and containers, you’re limited to either what’s compatible with the vendor’s virtual infrastructure or time-intensive workarounds.

With a vision of the future, your developers cobble together a system—but each iteration is more complicated than the last. To keep everything working, your system administrators are often in the office on weekends troubleshooting system failures or rewriting patches and updates. And you start to realize that the next licensing agreement you sign will take away even more money you could have invested in modern products and solutions.

On the other hand:
Open source virtualization would give you complete control over the infrastructure and everything that relies on it. That means you can modify it to work with (or without) any vendor. There’s no need for an ELA—because there’s no source code to protect. It’s yours.

Despite the claims of IT vendors, adopting new technologies and processes is never fast or easy. It’s a multiyear vision that requires constant change. Each improvement to your IT architecture is a step forward, but you can leap forward by combining those advances with agile processes and cross-functional collaboration.

But that first step—improving your IT architecture—isn’t that simple when you’re contractually bound to a vendor that restricts access to source code, which is the key to making things work the way you want them to. Software that keeps you out of its code is usually tied to an ELA that deters you from swapping vendors, causing you to become so reliant that you'll pay whatever inflated prices come with the next ELA. This can reduce what you could have invested in modern technologies like clouds, containers, and automation systems, and can affect a lot of people:

Supporting the entire stack

When merely tweaking your virtual infrastructure isn’t enough, you need a trusted partner that understands every layer of your enterprise IT stack. We offer software and support for every enterprise IT need, from infrastructure to platforms, storage to containers, and management to automation. And, unlike some vendors’ technologies that are engineered by different companies with different cost centers, application programming interfaces (APIs), and support teams, our products are developed together to enhance the interdependencies between the core technologies:

• Our cloud computing platform is co-engineered with our operating system and virtualization platform so you can move to the cloud quickly or just scale up and out at the same time.
• Our virtualization platform is based off KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), which has been part of the mainline Linux® kernel since 2007. So all the stability, consistency, and compatibility of Linux is shared with the virtual layer.
• Everything shares common APIs and management tools, which helps connect systems, share information, and unify management.

By deploying an infrastructure built on our open source technologies, you can simplify your IT stack while still maintaining your ability to do whatever you want with (or without) any software, vendor, or product.

Our infrastructure migration solution

Migrating your virtual infrastructure to Red Hat® solutions can reduce your infrastructure spending, which gives you more opportunities to invest in advanced application development technologies like hybrid cloud, containers, and automation. Our migration solution helps you define a process that begins where you are today and ends with an open source infrastructure that can handle tomorrow’s challenges. The 3 primary parts of this process—which helped P.L. Ferrari & Company and other customers reduce their virtualization IT and infrastructure costs—include:

The capabilities of open source

You can’t dedicate 100% of their business to a single vendor’s infrastructure, platform, or application. But a virtual infrastructure built on open source technology gives you complete control over the entire stack and everything that relies on it, allowing your applications and services to just work—regardless of where they are or what’s supporting them.

We believe enterprise technology should be open—period. So go ahead: Inspect, modify, and enhance the source code behind our technologies. With products trusted by more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies,* there’s very little you can’t do with an infrastructure built on Red Hat products and technologies.

*Red Hat client data and Fortune 500 list, June 2018