Re: Can I do my i from the cloud

I have a book titled, Thinking of Offering a Cloud Solution? It has a question
and answer format that is concise and easy to read, and has a lot of good
material.

Mel Beckman wrote a blog this month about IBM moving toward offering IBM i cloud
services:

http://blogs.systeminetwork.com/isnblogs/industrybits/2011/04/ibm_announces_cloud_for_power_1.html#comments


"Ric Telford, vice president of cloud services at Global Technology Services,
says that IBM understands that there is a requirement to support its own IBM i
(formerly known as OS/400) proprietary operating system on the Smart Cloud
Enterprise+ cloud, but did not offer any estimate of when this might be
available.
-Nathan



----- Original Message ----
From: Pete Helgren <pete@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thu, April 21, 2011 9:27:26 AM
Subject: Re: Can I do my i from the cloud

I think you just need to think through what you need. If the issue is
administration, backup, failover and security, basically outsourcing the
box and administration, then there are probably several folks out there
that are a "service bureau" style operation that will handle that for
you. The "rent" vs buy isn't an easy decision. Cost/benefit analysis
can be difficult.

I see the "cloud" as completely virtual and very different than the
"service bureau" The i seems well suited for this but I think the need
for it is rather specialized. Since your box would be virtual you can
add processing capacity, memory and storage on the fly. Spin up an
instance and then "park" it for a while then reactivate it. This kind
of thing makes sense in environments that demand maximum flexibility.
The interesting thing is that you get *some* of this flexibility on i
out of the box so the question would be why go to the cloud for it? If
a "slice" of an i is all you need, I can see a great need for that and I
think that is where the iDevCloud folks come in. At the other end, the
highly flexible, variable demand business, I can see the economics and
flexibility of the cloud would be a plus, though my guess is that you
would pay for it. But, in the middle, with predicable workloads and
growth, I don't see the need for the slice or the whole enchilada. The
service bureau model *might* fit in that space but it would be
contingent on your in house expertise and the need for backup, fail over
and other DR factors I think.

I run about 5-7 servers and the i here at my home. When you add up the
costs of the leasing, the hardware, time invested in updating and
troubleshoot AND the electricity bill (which my wife always reminds me
of!) I could probably do things much cheaper using a service bureau/ASP
style hosting. But then I wouldn't know the details of the operations
and would be less knowledgeable about them and couldn't be as helpful to
my customers. I learn a lot from running my own shop, and I believe
that the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs (financial, time
invested and personal hassle).

All things to consider.

Pete Helgren
Value Added Software, Inc
www.asaap.com
www.opensource4i.com