Application Modernization

Modernizing applications, barring monoliths that are tightly coupled with the underlying infrastructure, means consolidating, repurposing, or refactoring legacy software and applications. It also means modernizing the platform infrastructure to create new business value from existing applications and to ensure that it aligns closely with current business needs. Legacy modernization leverages, rather than upgrading, retiring an existing system, or replacing it wholesale, extending the lifespan of an organization’s applications and taking advantage of technical innovations.

Planning to modernize legacy or even modern applications from a physical to a virtual environment is very important. There are many options available for application modernization or legacy modernization.

The one discussed in this blog is about migrating an entire database to a new environment with a container orchestrator such as VMware Tanzu. In this study, migrating a MySQL workload from an older PowerEdge MX740c environment to a newer PowerEdge MX750c consolidates the hardware platform and reaps the benefits of VMware Tanzu containers.

To help organizations understand the value of refreshing their older Dell PowerEdge hardware to newer 15G compute sleds with VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) containerization, we conducted a series of tests:

• First, we measured the OLTP performance of MySQL virtual machines from a legacy PowerEdge MX740c compute sled running VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 3.
• Next, we recorded the amount of time necessary to migrate and containerize those VMs to a new Dell PowerEdge MX750c compute sled running the same version of vSphere with VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes.
• Finally, we measured OLTP performance and looked at how it would allow consolidation in the new, containerized MySQL environment.

Benefits of App Modernization with Dell PowerEdge MX7000 and VMware Tanzu

The PowerEdge MX is designed for the software-defined data center—able to support a combination of dense virtualization, software-defined storage, software-defined networking, artificial intelligence, and big data projects. PowerEdge MX, with its kinetic infrastructure, is uniquely designed without a mid-plane, enabling support for multiple generations of technology releases—processor technologies, new storage types and new connectivity innovations—well into the future. By creating on-the-fly hardware capacity, overprovisioning and stranded assets are reduced as performance and efficiency are optimized.

Whether your target application is e-commerce, a critical financial application, or some other business-specific application, the process of application modernization encompasses the whole range of things you can do to an application to:

• Simplify management and maintenance
• Test the app more efficiently
• Ship new versions more quickly
• Scale the app more easily
• Utilize modern infrastructure
• Decrease costs

Dell PowerEdge MX provides an intelligent and modular framework that enables data and workload mobility across the infrastructure, while VMware Tanzu speeds the overall application modernization, making that process simpler, more agile and efficient, and less costly.

So, when you pair PowerEdge MX with VMware Tanzu, it combines software designed, customizable modules of compute, storage, and networking with a modular cloud native application platform that gets apps to production faster and adapts quickly to changing business, customer, and security requirements.

Finally, the goal of application modernization should be to deliver the specific set of benefits you need, not all possible benefits. Successful application modernization depends on choosing the right applications, processes, and tools. VMware Tanzu container technology brings various benefits by packaging applications and their run-time environments into executable modules of software that have a small footprint, are portable, are easy to build and deploy, and optimized to have low runtime overhead. In this way, VMware Tanzu delivers the expertise and advanced tooling to help an organization's modernization journey.

Resources

To access the reports of the study, see the following:

• Infographic: Application Modernization Benefits with Dell PowerEdge and VMware Tanzu
• White paper: Application Modernization Benefits with Dell PowerEdge and VMware Tanzu
• Science: The Science Behind: Application Modernization Benefits with Dell PowerEdge and VMware Tanzu

Author: Thomas MM