South African businesses face familiar pressures: workloads keep growing, data volumes expand each year and budgets remain tight.
Many IT teams still run estates built over several hardware generations. Servers sit underutilised, power consumption climbs and management becomes complex.
Modernising infrastructure changes that equation.
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Solutions such as HPE VM Essentials running on HPE ProLiant Gen12 servers give organisations a path to consolidate workloads, simplify operations and control costs while strengthening security.
According to Tarsus Distribution’s HPE GM for enterprise (traditional technologies), Riaan Swart, the opportunity starts with consolidation.
“Many environments are still spread across multiple older servers. Moving those workloads onto the latest-generation compute platforms dramatically reduces the hardware footprint while increasing performance,” he says.
Modernise your servers, maximise ROI
Older server estates often hide real costs
- Underused compute capacity
- Rising maintenance contracts
- Increased rack space and cooling requirements – when organisations consolidate workloads onto HPE ProLiant Gen12 platforms, they unlock measurable gains
- Fewer physical servers required
- Higher workload density
- Improved performance per core
This leads directly to stronger return on infrastructure investment.
“Gen12 servers deliver significant gains in performance per watt,” says Swart. “When businesses consolidate workloads, they see immediate reductions in power draw and cooling demand.”
That matters in South Africa where energy costs continue to climb.
Lower energy consumption also reduces pressure on data centre capacity, which allows IT teams to delay expensive expansions.
Do more. Spend less. Modernise now
Infrastructure costs do not stop at hardware.
Licensing and support contracts often represent a large portion of long-term spend. Consolidation changes this as well.
With a smaller number of physical servers, organisations can reduce:
- Virtualisation licensing requirements
- Hardware support contracts
- Operational management overhead
“HPE VM Essentials helps simplify licensing structures while giving organisations a virtualisation platform that integrates tightly with HPE infrastructure,” says Swart.
That close alignment between software and hardware reduces complexity for IT teams and lowers the effort required to manage large estates.
Support costs also improve when organisations move to newer platforms. Instead of maintaining several ageing systems across different lifecycle stages, IT teams can standardise on a modern platform backed by current support services.
Security starts at the silicon
Cyberthreats continue to grow more sophisticated. Infrastructure security must begin at the hardware level.
HPE addresses this challenge with Silicon Root of Trust, embedded directly within the server architecture. This technology creates a hardware-based fingerprint that verifies firmware integrity every time the server boots.
If malicious code attempts to compromise the system firmware, the server detects the change and can trigger recovery actions.
“Security cannot start at the operating system,” Swart explains. “It must begin in the silicon. HPE’s Silicon Root of Trust, combined with the capabilities within iLO, gives organisations deep visibility and control over the integrity of their infrastructure.”
Enhancements in the latest generation strengthen this protection further, giving IT teams confidence that their environment remains protected from firmware attacks.
For organisations handling sensitive workloads or regulated data, this layer of protection becomes a critical requirement.
AI-powered automation for modern IT operations
Managing infrastructure estates manually becomes difficult as environments grow.
HPE addresses this with Compute Operations Manager (COM), which helps IT teams control and automate large server environments from a single interface. COM allows administrators to:
- Monitor server estates across locations
- Deploy and configure systems at scale
- Automate updates and lifecycle management
- Maintain consistent configurations across infrastructure
“Compute Operations Manager simplifies how organisations manage their server environments,” says Swart. “IT teams can activate the platform quickly and gain immediate visibility across their estate.”
Automation reduces routine administrative work, freeing IT teams to focus on higher-value tasks such as improving application performance or supporting new business services.
It also reduces the risk of configuration drift across environments, which strengthens reliability and security.
Preparing infrastructure for the next wave of workloads
Workloads continue to evolve. AI, analytics, hybrid cloud and modern applications demand higher performance and better management across infrastructure environments. Modernising server estates provides the foundation required to support these demands.
With HPE VM Essentials running on next-generation compute platforms, organisations gain:
- Higher performance and workload density
- Lower energy and cooling requirements
- Simplified licensing and support structures
- Hardware-level security protections
- Centralised management and automation
“Modernising infrastructure is not only about performance,” Swart says. “It is about reducing operational complexity, strengthening security and giving organisations the platform they need to support future workloads.”
Assess your infrastructure at no cost
Many organisations know their infrastructure needs attention but are unsure where to begin.
Tarsus Distribution works with its partner network to help businesses evaluate their current server estates and identify consolidation opportunities. Through a no-cost infrastructure assessment, organisations can gain a clearer view of:
- Current server utilisation and capacity
- Power and cooling consumption
- Licensing and support exposure
- Opportunities to consolidate workloads onto modern compute platforms
This assessment provides practical insight into where modernisation can reduce cost and improve performance.
Businesses interested in exploring the benefits of HPE ProLiant Gen12 and HPE VM Essentials can engage with a Tarsus partner to begin the process and build a clear road map for infrastructure modernisation. Learn more here.
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