Proprietary infrastructure can be complex and costly. From siloed compute, network and storage tiers to manual day-2 operations, closed infrastructure stacks can require significant upkeep and maintenance. Often in the race to deliver projects on time, technical debt accrues and can show up in the form of unnecessary redundancies in infrastructure that cause significant drag on IT over time.

According to Gartner , "investment in digital business transformation is now the most-common motivation for saving money from IT budgets (62 percent of respondents)." In addition to cost considerations, I believe that many IT organizations have also realized that long term commitments with proprietary software vendors can limit choice, putting their operations on a path towards a single vendor future and limiting their potential for IT innovation.

The Red Hat infrastructure migration solution provides a modern, simplified infrastructure designed to reduce the complexity and cost of operations. It helps to break the cycle of long term commitments to a proprietary infrastructure while delivering the necessary tools that can make the mass migration of workloads a snap. Perhaps more importantly, it enables the first step towards the open hybrid cloud - where any application can run on any IT footprint with a consistent and simplified infrastructure.

The solution originally launched in late August and offered point and click tooling that provided mass migration capabilities, special pricing and standardized deployment patterns from VMware to Red Hat Virtualization . Today, we are excited to announce new capabilities to extend our migration capabilities to two new target platforms, providing greater customer choice, helping to further reduce infrastructure complexity and facilitating a pathway to open hybrid cloud environments.

Mass migration to Red Hat OpenStack Platform

The first of the two new target platforms is Red Hat OpenStack Platform . Red Hat OpenStack Platform virtualizes resources from industry-standard hardware, organizes those resources into clouds and manages them so users can access what they need when they need it. Customers turn to this infrastructure to run applications and services on a flexible, scalable and proven private cloud.

Red Hat’s infrastructure migration solution can now help customers more safely and easily migrate to this highly scalable infrastructure. Powered by a pre-scoped Red Hat Consulting engagement available with the solution, Red Hat OpenStack Platform is first deployed and tested on-premises in customer environments. Then, through mentoring and formal training, the solution empowers customers to migrate the bulk of their workloads on their own with newly developed capabilities backed by Red Hat’s industry-leading support, removing the need to fund onsite consultants throughout the migration. This not only helps to increase customer domain expertise but also can maximize short and long term cost savings that can then be shifted to broader digital transformation efforts.

Workload migration to Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization is the second target platform option now available in the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution. Hyperconverged infrastructures consolidate and simplify compute, storage and network infrastructure for business-critical applications. Based on Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat Storage and Red Hat Ansible Automation, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is designed to simplify planning and procurement, streamline deployment and management and provide a single lifecycle experience for virtual compute and virtual storage resources.

Like the new migration capabilities extending to Red Hat OpenStack Platform, our newest version of the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution now provides tooling and services to deploy Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure and migrate workloads in a facilitated and easy manner. This helps to empower customers to lead mass virtual machine migration efforts to the new infrastructure, enjoying the benefits of enterprise-grade hyperconvergence with full ownership of future direction.

Regardless of the target platform, customers embracing the Red Hat infrastructure migration solution can free themselves from long term proprietary contracts and see cost-savings over existing proprietary technologies. These savings can enable organizations to then accelerate adoption of transformational technologies such as Linux container technology , IT automation and multicloud management . Complexity is also reduced, as the new streamlined infrastructure can help to eliminate decades of technical debt, accumulated inadvertently over the years with overlapping technologies, long-forgotten requirements and "good enough" architectures.

Check out your potential cost savings using our VM cost cutting calculator , our watch our-ever popular " Open Your Possibilities " video to learn more!

Gordon Tillmore is senior principal product marketing manager for Cloud Infrastructure at Red Hat.

Gartner Enterprises Cut IT Budgets to Pay for Digital Business, Stewart Buchanan and Cesar Lozada, October 3, 2018