WHITE PAPER

App360 Helps Regain Control Over Bare-Metal Server Resources –

A cloud migration imperative for mature IT infrastructure

Cloud computing represents an unprecedented paradigm shift in the way IT services and solutions are
delivered. The transition to cloud computing has largely shaped the IT infrastructure and architectural
preferences for progressive, IT-enabled organizations. This means that the underlying apps and services
that were previously powered by bare-metal server resources, are now preferably operated through
cloud or virtualized environments.

For organizations that have been in the game for long enough, the decision and process to effectively
move apps and services from bare-metal servers to cloud resources has been labor intensive and
complicated. Unlike new startup firms, the more mature business organizations must undergo a
strategic planning phase to determine the viability of cloud migration for every app and service running
on their legacy IT infrastructure. The decision usually results on keeping difficult to migrate apps
untouched and continued to run on bare-metal servers.

While maintaining the legacy infrastructure may only serve to a limited set of IT applications, the end-
result is a diverse and distributed IT infrastructure that is highly dependent upon the underlying
resources delivered through a mix of public and private cloud, in-house virtualized and bare-metal
server technologies.

This white paper explores the resulting challenges and presents App360 version 4.3 with bare-metal
server support as a unique and effective solution to enable a truly unified multi-cloud, multi-resource
infrastructure management for organizations that must continue operations via bare-metal server
resources.

1
Bare-Metal Server Challenge: Failure to Migrate

Enterprises having been transitioning their IT infrastructure to virtualized and cloud environments for
years but most are still stuck with bare-metal server workloads that are either unable to run on modern
infrastructure or too risky to migrate. In particular, legacy apps prevent organizations from migrating to
the cloud, especially when a simple “lift and shift” process is hurdled by a complicated set of
considerations, procedures and challenges that IT organizations must address beforehand. When legacy
apps and services designed for outdated OS versions and the dependent network resources, any change
in the underlying hardware configurations directly impacts the app performance and functionality. An
effective migration plan for these apps and services is only possible when the responsible IT teams are
adequately knowledgeable of the legacy apps and IT resources. Since organizations have shifted focus
away from bare-metal based IT environments in recent years, this knowledgebase has diminished. IT
teams previously in charge of bare-metal servers have moved forward and embraced the cloud, shifted
roles or at least inclined their focus toward cloud environments.

As a result, organizations are left with two apparent options: abandon legacy apps and services
altogether in favor of an organization-wide cloud migration – or continue operating bare-metal servers
together with cloud environments. Abandoning of legacy apps that are already responsible for some – if
not many – business operations may not be an effective strategic solution to achieve cloud migration
goals.

Instead, organizations are compelled to consider bare-metal server systems operating in conjunction
with cloud-based deployments. However, it is important to understand that cloud computing is far from
a plug-and-play solution unless adequate means of cloud automation and management solution are in
place. A custom mix of knowledgebase, experience and technologies is required to ensure that bare-
metal servers continue to power the apps and services that cannot move to the cloud while
organizations can effectively operate most of the IT workloads from the cloud.

Bare-Metal Server Challenge: Expensive Management

Bare-metal servers by definition are designed to operate a single operating system with a limited set of
apps. This prevents organizations from optimizing investments on bare-metal server resources,
especially if organizations are unable to optimize workload sharing capabilities with the hardware – or at
least, increasing utilization rates cost-effectively.

Even when the efforts are justified by the business interests to keep the aging bare-metal server
infrastructure up and running, organizations must dedicate resources to meet corporate SLAs. Despite
these efforts however, failing bare-metal server operations remains to be a real possibility. Many bare-
metal servers in the current era were deployed over five years ago, with limited hardware and software
support offered by the vendors. These aging servers were originally managed by very expensive system
management platforms from vendors such as BMC and CA.

The maintenance & support costs now are higher than these servers’ value; therefore, most
organizations have discontinued system management support altogether. In this context, an effective

2
management paradigm is required to take care of bare-metal servers that are vulnerable to outages,
failure or security issues.

Bare-Metal Server Challenge: The Mystery Zone

Some of these bare-metal servers are still running mission-critical applications such as ERP, HR and
Active Directory. But many were built years ago to run group applications such as reports that no one
has used for a long time – no owner, nor documentation is available. No one dares to alter the
configurations and the original set-up of working servers. However, the performance, capacity and
security optimization of these aging technologies are inherently dependent on expensive system
management tools. When updates are required or resources need to be re-configured to meet new
requirements, the lack of documentation and tracked usage history prevents IT teams from operating
and scaling effectively. As a result, the business capacity of the IT infrastructure suffers – especially since
IT problems are increasingly, a business problem.

Without adequate documentation to support diagnostics, troubleshooting and problem resolution,

organizations risk downtime for prolonged time period. Within a complex IT infrastructure environment,
failure to quickly and automatically pinpoint problems down to the root cause means significant
business downtime and losses – at the average rate of $100k per hour according to a recent IDC
research. Risk of downtime due to bare-metal server failure is inherently caused by the fragmented
processes around maintenance and management of the technologies. According to the IDC research, 43
percent of the surveyed Fortune 1000 organizations find these fragmented process as impediment to
the adoption of DevOps processes that promises productive, profitable and sustainable IT-enabled
business practices in the era of cloud computing.

Bare-Metal Server Challenge: The Planning Nightmare

Most organizations don’t have accurate bare-metal server lists nor server specs, credentials and running
operating systems. With that, IT professionals have very difficult time to plan these servers for
migration, protection and retirement. This can be very high risks when outages occur and no accurate
server information to guide troubleshooting and support. This leads to a fragmented set of IT
infrastructure that fails to operate as an integrated, unified and secure computing environment for
mission-critical or resource-intensive applications.

Operating public, private and hybrid cloud deployments together with on-premise bare-metal servers
therefore results in a chaotic heterogeneous mix of IT infrastructure resources. The fragmented IT
infrastructure not only underperforms during the working lifecycle period of bare-metal servers, but
also prevents organizations from developing a proactive strategic plan for cloud migration once the
aging hardware is retired.

The App360 v4.3 Platform with Integrated Bare-Metal Server Support

As IT apps and services get more interwoven, intelligent and truly instrumental in dictating business
success, the performance of underlying infrastructure must be stretched to its maximum value. Rapid

3
provisioning, automated management and the flexibility to leverage hardware instance across bare-
metal, cloud and virtualized deployment options allows organizations to align IT with strategic business
goals. The App360 version 4.3 enables the following capabilities to help IT teams operating bare-metal
resources in achieving these objectives:

1. Identify and list all bare-metal servers within a consolidated management console. Users can
perform single and bulk importing of bare-metal server lists automatically. This feature is
particularly suitable for large-enterprises or distributed organizations where manual processes
are subject to limitations, errors or effort-consuming. App360 creates server records/profiles
similar to virtual and cloud servers. This makes adding the list of bare-metal servers to App360
very quick and convenient. App360 can start monitoring these servers to replace expensive
server management tools.
2. Enterprises still have bare-metal servers running apps with unknown importance. They usually
don’t have accurate server lists with server specs, running apps and functional proposes.
App360 automatically discovers server specs such as CPU, memory, disks and network
interfaces. This capability is particularly suitable for users with direct access limitations to the
servers such as remote data centers. Effective strategic planning for migration, protection and
retirement is not possible in organizations if this information is not adequately identified and
maintained. To eliminate these concerns, the server specs discovered by the App360 solution
are automatically linked to appropriate bare-metal server profiles for tracking and management
in the future.
3. App360 takes this capability a step ahead by allowing users to update and track records with
crucial information for every server resource as per the evolving organizational policies. For
instance, if a server is very important but has no migration path, users can label a remark
suggesting: “Mission Critical: Do not make changes.”
4. App360 can categorize bare-metal servers in resource pools based on unique tags such as
function, location or requirement, among others. Each resource pool can be a physical location
such as ‘London data center 2’ or function such as ‘Finance’. This capability simplifies the
migration path by enabling unique workload transfer process for every resource pool category.
For instance, your organization may only require migration of the server group ‘London data
center 2’ – with App360, this list is already available and isolated for execution of the unique
migration policy requirement.
5. App360 can discover real-time status and perform monitoring of bare-metal server resources.
Identify the dynamic performance of the entire sever landscape across all deployment models –
cloud, virtualized or bare-metal servers deployed on-site. Most of these servers are out of
support with unknown specs and running unknown apps. These servers may have previously
used expensive server management tools such as BMC and CA that no longer can justify the
cost. With that, they aren’t being managed nor monitored at all. IT wants to migrate them to
cloud but hesitates due to many unknowns that make planning very difficult. With App360 now
supporting bare-metal server management and performance monitoring, organizations no
longer need to invest in expensive platforms.
6. App360 allows IT admins to group functionally related servers into workloads. This allows IT
admins to visualize their functional environments through an intuitive dashboard. For instance,
consider a CRM system comprising of web and database applications. These apps can run on
different and multiple bare-metal servers. By grouping them into workloads, it easier for IT
admins to visualize and plan migrations accordingly. Users can also implement individual

4
 migration scenarios as required. For instance, the App360 workload function can add
tremendous value on migration planning in the following ways:
o Servers must migrate together as web apps need access to database servers for data.
o Upon migration, these servers will get different IPs and hostnames. If not configured at
the target environment as per the defined protocols, web apps will remain unable to
access databases and fail.
o IT can develop server migration plans by evaluating server usage, app importance and
the ability for apps to run in the cloud.
7. App360 can centralize bare-metal server operations. With a single-pane-of-glass view, IT teams
can control the entire spectrum of server deployments from an intuitive and functional
dashboard interface. The App360 user interface offers a range of functionality – from
deployment and provisioning to performance monitoring – or even the simple task of reboots
and shutdown of individual or multiple servers.
8. App360 can automate application installation. Similar to virtual and cloud servers, users can
select pre-packaged applications in the library for automatic installation on bare-metal servers
such as MySQL, Apache and Mongo Database. No coding or third-party add-ons are required to
enable the key functionality of application installation across individual servers or a distributed
network of server resources.

Customer case

A major telco committed to serve a growing customer-base with connectivity solutions was struggling to
optimize its IT infrastructure resource pool that included over a hundred bare-metal server
deployments. Infrastructure operations were maintained without adequate and accurate information on
server resources, specifications, documentation, or even the apps and IT workloads dedicated to
individual or collective hardware resources. In order to cope with the server sprawl and the need to
migrate IT workloads to cloud alternatives, the telco giant needed advanced automation and
management capabilities to take care of its server infrastructure. Their migration plans were
consistently rendered as flawed due to inadequate visibility and control at a granular server hardware
level. As a result, the organization had to stifle plans to leverage a multi-cloud and hybrid IT strategy to
maximize its value potential and expand business operations profitably.

As a solution, the telco company leveraged App360 to manage its virtual and cloud environments. With
the right set of tooling in place, the company was able to add bare-metal server support and import the
server list to App360 with minimal efforts. And with a few simple clicks through an intuitive and fully-
functional dashboard interface, the IT team resolved the complex server management challenges that
previously seemed impossible to address.

App360 automatically discovered server specs and added the information to server profiles prior to
monitoring the infrastructure performance. IT admins were effectively able to leverage App360 for bare-
metal server management, operations and monitoring while also keeping an eye on the wider hybrid IT
infrastructure. Based on server utilization and importance, IT admins group the bare-metal servers into
various migration priorities. For examples, servers with no CPU usage and running unknown apps were
identified and remarked as “low migration priority”. Servers with high usage and apps that can run on

5
cloud were managed with the remarks “high migration priority” labeled to appropriate server instance.
Using this information, the telco company migrated “high migration priority” servers first, which totals
up to twenty server units. IT admins then grouped application related servers into workloads such as
ERP, CRM and HR, and are able to migrate workloads individually – one at a time to ensure a predictable
and successful transition process.

The Results?

The migration process of high priority apps from bare-metal servers to the cloud previously took over a
year and yet failed to yield the intended performance and availability goals. With App360, the process
took only three months and unlocked the true value potential of a cohesive, tightly integrated and
streamlined multi-cloud, hybrid-IT infrastructure. Furthermore, the app operations were successfully
maintained at a high standard in terms of availability, security and performance.

As a result of the efficient, effective and automation-driven transition process, the telco company was
able to:

 Increase speed to market with cloud-enabled back-end processes to serve the fast-expanding
customer-base.
 Leveraged IT as an enabler of innovation instead of draining resources merely to keep bare-
metal server resources alive.
 Supports geographically dispersed and disparate growth with the ability to manage server
resources from anywhere, anytime.

About Appcara

Appcara is a leading software vendor globally offering cloud and application management solutions for
enterprises to accelerate their cloud journey. Cloud has been a key strategy for CIOs for over a decade
but transition to cloud has been a challenge. Appcara’s App360 aims to simplify the cloud journey for
enterprises to achieve higher efficiency and true ROI.