Just completed 8 city roadshow with Dell and Red Hat, talking to customers face to face over lunch about how a migration should be planned and done from UNIX/RISC to RHEL/Intel/Dell.
I had opportunities to attend two of the seminars in different cities, meeting few different customers. Customers came to our seminar to look for a template to quickly develop a plan that could also be approved quickly and get the project going to counter the enormous management pressure they get to do more with less.
Most of the customers I had conversations with were from medium size business.
One customer clearly said, it is no brainer, there is no reason to advocate to purchase new AIX/Power or Solaris/SPARC machines any more.
The other customer said, much of the knowledge accumulated to manage UNIX servers can immediately applied for migration activities while he saw the needs to get the UNIX administrators trained on RHEL through the training programs offered by Red Hat.
Consistently, there were the nuance that customers needed to act now, for a short term result.
For those who needs to get going on planning, Red Hat has put together a very good migration guide. The document helps you start thinking about and resourcing your migration. Register, to get started. Also, a lighter version to get an idea.
Please contact RHEL, Dell, or Intel representative for the next steps, and if you don’t have such resource, let me know. I’ll help dispatch one to you.