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Cloud Hosting: Handling Hardware Decommissions

Did you receive the dreaded email with "Action Required: Evacuation of PODs"? We all thought that if you put your server in the cloud, that you no longer have to worry about hardware upgrades as the provider takes care of all that. So why did you get that email?

Cloud Hosting: Handling Hardware Decommissions

Philip Cheshire

Did you receive the dreaded “Action Required: Evacuation of PODs” email?

We all thought that if you put your server in the cloud, that you no longer have to worry about hardware upgrades as the provider takes care of all that. That’s true except when your cloud provider decides it’s time to decommission that wonderful hardware your server is sitting on, which explains why you may have received that email notification of IBM decommissioning some of their servers.

Those who are new to cloud services and cloud hosting might find this surprising, but it’s a very common thing for the providers to do. They have to make sure they provide all their customers with the very best hardware available in order to be the best performing cloud provider out there, and that comes with a limited shelf life of the server hardware they leverage. 

Just like an internally managed box, once your hardware goes out of support, or starts showing signs of degradation, it’s time to upgrade and decommission it before you have a real problem on your hands! Luckily the providers give you a fair amount of notice before shutting everything down and most will work with you on getting a new machine spun up and some tools to help you migrate to the new machine.

While most customers will want to simply migrate to the new server, if time allows then you should consider performing a software upgrade at the same time. Doing so makes sure that you’re capitalizing on everything the new hardware can provide for you, including new software enhancements with the latest versions. For example, if the server getting decommissioned is running IBM WebSphere v8.x, consider migrating to v9.x to leverage the latest and greatest the middleware has to offer its applications.

But what happens when your entire environment is getting decommissioned, like 10-100+ servers? How will my engineers manage performing all the planned activities for the year AND migrate all those servers!?!?

Fear not, help is here! There are a lot of options available off the shelf but they all will take some sort of man power to plan and execute diligently. If you find yourself stuck or having trouble, be sure to reach out to your partners for help.

Asponte is well-versed in migrating machines– as we recently did this exact thing! First we moved our on-site servers to the cloud and then migrated from a decommissioned cloud machine to a brand new pod within our provider’s cloud. We do the same for all our Managed Services customers!

Contact Asponte today to find out how we can help you tackle this type of opportunity for upgrades and migrations.