RackN

Why Vendor Lock-In Is Killing Your Infrastructure Budget And Your Innovation

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TL;DR: Choice is freedom from lock-in. When you diversify vendors and platforms, you maintain leverage, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation. The companies seeing 30%+ savings aren’t getting lucky with procurement; they’re building operational flexibility that drives better outcomes. Here’s a question that makes infrastructure teams uncomfortable: “If one of your primary vendors doubled their prices […]

The IT Operations Speed Traps

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Let’s talk about speed in IT operations. Not the kind where you rush through deployments and hope nothing breaks, but the kind where your infrastructure operations actually keep pace with business demands. The thing is that the answer to moving faster is usually getting out of your own way first. The Hidden Tax of Manual […]

Why Most Infrastructure Teams Can’t Scale (And How to Fix It)

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TL;DR: Scaling infrastructure isn’t about adding more servers or people. It’s about eliminating the manual processes and configuration drift that make growth expensive and unreliable. Most IT environments weren’t built to scale, and that’s why so many teams find themselves trapped in firefighting mode. Here’s a conversation we have with operations teams almost weekly: “We […]

A New Way to Decommission Servers

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New servers bring efficiency gains, but old gear doesn’t vanish when the new machines are onboarded. The old servers are often still functional and valuable, but it’s not the best idea to just let them sit in your data centers. If left unmanaged, they waste space, pose security risks, and might end up in landfills. […]

Making Patch Management More Resilient

Thumbnail for Gartner Report How to Balance Patch Management and Operational Resilience, includes a graphic from the report visualizing each stage of the recommended patch process.

Patch management is often seen as routine, but the report How to Balance Patch Management and Operational Resilience by Gartner® analysts Lina Al Dana, Todd Larivee, and Chris Saunderson shows that it is central to how IT Operations stay resilient and limit risk. It states that “a risk-based patch management approach enabled by I&O and […]

Bare Metal is Boring – Until It Breaks

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In enterprise IT, we talk a lot about automation, cloud-native platforms, and innovation. But the layer everything depends on is often ignored: bare metal. Why? Because bare metal is boring. Until it breaks. Boring ≠ Simple Many assume bare metal is simple because it changes slowly and doesn’t get much attention. That’s a mistake. Bare […]

Bare Metal Hypervisors

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For those seeking optimal performance, scalability, and flexibility in their virtual machines, a bare metal hypervisor is the answer you seek. From cloud edge environments to high-performance computing setups, these powerful tools unlock unmatched control and efficiency. Still, it’s important to understand just what, exactly, a bare metal hypervisor is in the first place, as […]

OpenShift Virtualization vs. VMware

Thumbnail for OpenShift Virtualization vs. VMware blog post. Graphic depicts the logos for OpenShift and VMware over a depiction of a virtual machine running on a computer monitor.

Many of today’s businesses are rethinking their virtualization strategies. Some, in fact, are even considering a move away from VMware in favor of an alternative: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. While VMware excels at supporting virtual machines and scalable workloads, its licensing model is complicated and expensive. OpenShift, in contrast, is built on Kubernetes and offers […]