If your organisation is running a legacy SPARC/Solaris environment, it is tempted to leave things as they are. You know what the shortcomings of these systems are – and how to work around them.
But to simply ‘ignore’ issues is a false economy. Inefficient operations are a drain on financial and technical resources, adding to the cost of the legacy environment – a concept that Gartner calls ‘technical debt’.
Resolve the issues
Replacing a legacy operating environment is costly and disruptive – both good reasons for delaying a migration. But this is not to say that a legacy SPARC platform should remain entirely untouched.
If outright replacement is not yet an option, your business should be looking at ways to optimise the environment. This will ensure your systems (and processes) are running at their very best – and that bottlenecks and outages can be resolved to maximise efficiency and better contain costs.
Build a roadmap
Extended support for Solaris 10 will be withdrawn in January 2024. This creates a relatively narrow window for businesses to decide what happens next. At the most basic level are three choices:
1. Do nothing
2. Upgrade to Solaris 11, (possibly as a Solaris 10 Container running on the new OS)
3. Migrate to an alternative database/application
In reality, option 1 is not an option at all – particularly for mission-critical workloads. The increased risk presented by an unsupported OS is simply unacceptable. This means that your business needs to develop a SPARC/Solaris strategy – even if that is to permanently retire those systems.
A chance to get ahead
Developing a SPARC / Solaris 10 strategy offers you a chance to bring your overall IT estate back on track:
Optimising performance and operations to reduce running costs, freeing up the budget for investment in other strategic projects.
Planning an upgrade and migration path ensures you escape the technical debt trap, paying over the odds to maintain an officially unsupported operating environment.
Hardware resources can be redeployed for non-mission critical tasks, maximising return on investment without compromising your line of business operations.
Resources can be consolidated or retired, reducing costs of operations, licensing and support. Again, the money saved can be reinvested in strategic projects elsewhere.
With careful planning, you can realise a greater return from your ageing SPARC infrastructure – even if that is by simply retiring it.
Get help
It is not uncommon for a business to lack direction with their older SPARC / Solaris 10 systems. A major upgrade can be costly and risky – particularly if you lack the requisite skills in-house. Where this is the case, do not hesitate to seek external assistance – particularly as time is running out to define a workable strategy.
To learn more about your post-Solaris 10 options and what they mean for your SPARC/Solaris environment give the WTL team a team a call today.