Why Move from UNIX?

So what reasons are driving you to consider moving from your cozy UNIX environment that has served you so faithfully all these years ? Perhaps because you have the following goals:

• Reducing costs

• Increasing flexibility

• Improving performance

The next subsections examine each of these goals in greater detail.

Reducing Costs

For most organizations, information technology is a business enabler and a means to greater productivity, rather than a revenue generator. For this reason, IT services are a cost to the business and, like any other cost, need to deliver the highest possible levels of business value.

When assessing IT costs, you are likely to be looking beyond just the initial cost of acquisition to the total costs over a 5, 10, or 15 year life cycle, incorporating training, support, and maintenance costs into the equation. Therefore, when considering costs, you are likely to be looking for a solution that provides lower total cost of ownership, rather than the fact that, say, the operating system is free.

Increasing Flexibility

In the current shrinking economy, businesses have to be more flexible and able to react faster to remain competitive. Increasingly, it is the organization that can turn more sharply and realign itself to its clients needs fastest that wins the business. If you can provide the best infrastructure that lets your engineers , analysts, or scientists work to their fullest potential, then you are giving your organization the competitive edge that it needs to survive and thrive.

Improving Performance

Increasingly, applications such as computer aided engineering, risk analysis, and 3-D modeling and rendering are becoming mainstream tools, thus putting greater and greater demands on your computing infrastructure. You need to ensure that your equipment can scale effectively and provide the price-to-performance ratios so that you can give your organization s employees the horsepower that they need to carry out their jobs efficiently .