Do you have a plan for your environment’s “planned obsolescence”?

February 2, 2021

By Dan Libonati, Senior Solutions Architect

Today, most companies are focusing on their core competencies: their business and how to stay on top of it during the pandemic. The IT teams have been gearing up the infrastructure to ensure that business units or staff have been able to connect to critical applications and stay productive. When you have to put so much focus on just keeping things running, it takes away time needed to plan for the future. That includes keeping your eye on important updates for hardware, software and applications to remain current and “supported.” Let’s face it. Technology is built on a premise of planned obsolescence because features and functions are always being developed to make products better, faster and more efficient.

Some, if not all infrastructures are a combination of different vendors of hardware, software and applications. In most data centers, you might have storage arrays providing storage to more than one environment like vSphere or to bare metal servers. Companies that have invested in virtualization and storage arrays will need time to investigate how to upgrade or plan to move the workloads and data in these environments as vendors publish their end of support dates for hardware or software. Continuing to operate on technology that is out of support is a dangerous proposition.

One of the offerings we have at CPP Associates is to fully analyze a company’s environment using our assessment tools. This includes evaluating and identifying the hardware and software in the environment that is out of support or coming out of support. This snapshot allows us to recommend a strategy for a new environment, workload migration planning and to build solutions to provide for next generation software to be enabled in your business. As a 30-year veteran of IT (with 10 of those years running a data center) I know the pain. But the good news is that you have a partner in your corner who can help evaluate your existing environments and provide the consulting and solutions to move your business to next level. Ask your CPP representative for a rundown of the many assessment services we have to offer.