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Migrating to the planet of the apps

Let’s go back in time, say 20 years. The phone in hand is most likely a Nokia 6110. Staring intently at the screen with a resolution no higher than 240 x 320 pixels, a whole lot of Generation Xers are fascinated by the game du jour: ‘Snake’. Addictive in its simplicity, it illustrated the popularity of an application – back then a word not found in the everyday vocabulary, today though, commonly referred to as an app.

Fast-forward just over 10 years to 2008 and 500 apps are available for download in the Apple App Store. At last count, according to the ‘Number of apps available in leading app stores as of March 2017’ (statista.com), combined, there are now 6,503,500 million apps available from Google Play, Apple App Store, Windows Store, Amazon App Store and BlackBerry World.

“It’s almost as if there is a whole new world out there. A new sphere that needs to be managed,” says Anton Jacobsz, managing director of African value-added distributor, Networks Unlimited. “Organisations, institutions and individuals are all witnessing the power of apps and relying more and more on these for business, academic and personal lifestyle purposes. But, as with all technology, apps too are evolving within the era of seamless connectivity, and there is thus a need to modernise and manage new, existing, and even legacy apps.”

He points to Networks Unlimited’s vendor partner, HyperGrid’s detailed white paper, ‘3 Steps to Containerise* and and Migrate Apps to any Cloud’, which addresses this modernisation for Java and .NET applications.

“For many IT organisations that inherit legacy applications without any documentation or much knowledge about the application dependencies, the task of modernising these applications while avoiding application code changes becomes overwhelming,” reads the paper.

It indicates HyperForm as a technology driving business innovation by modernising existing legacy applications without making a single code change and using the existing skill sets within an organisation.

HyperForm has already proven itself in the app world as a powerful solution to simplify the application journey to containers. It deploys and manages existing enterprise applications and cloud-native applications seamlessly across any cloud or container infrastructure – including HyperGrid, VMware vSphere, OpenStack, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and many others. HyperForm provides ‘on-the-fly’ containerisation, data injection and service discovery for both brownfield legacy apps (such as Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, enterprise Java and .NET apps, etc.) and microservices.

“The on-the-fly containerisation capabilities allow users to ‘lift and shift’ existing Java and .NET applications to containers while taking care of the complex application dependencies, automatic service discovery, auto-scaling and integration with any external service, such as storage, networking and logging,” logging,” explains Doug Rich, vice president for the EMEA region at HyperGrid.

This means, HyperForm transforms non-cloud-native legacy applications into completely portable applications that can take advantage of auto scaling and deployment agility on any cloud.

The three simple steps to migrating existing applications to the cloud are listed in the aforementioned white paper as:
1.        Run Hyperform on premise using HyperForm SaaS
2.        Containerise your Java and .NET applications without making a single application code change
3.        Deploy, monitor, manage and operate your applications on any cloud using Hyperform

“These are such easy steps to simplify today’s IT management and to speed up deployment. Containerisation without a doubt offers organisations operating world-wide a huge advantage when migrating their apps to the cloud. It really is as simple as one, two, three,” concludes Jacobsz.

* Containerisation, also called container-based virtualisation and application containerisation, is an OS-level virtualisation method for deploying and running distributed applications without launching an entire VM for each application. Instead, multiple isolated systems, called containers, are run on a single control host and access a single kernel. [Source: TechTarget]

For more information about HyperGrid’s solutions in Africa, please contact Networks Unlimited on +27 (0) 11 202 8400, www.nu.co.za

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