Re: Midrange on IBM Cloud?

Larry,

<Vendor response>

As you likely know, Service Express is a cloud hosting company for IBM i and AIX as well as Linux on POWER.

Rather than tell you 'we're awesome' join my cloud, I want to point out things you need to understand about your cloud provider before you jump in with them.

First is what do you want your cloud to do?
-> Target for offsite tape
-> Target for offsite tape with DR as a service
-> HA Target
-> Production in the cloud with no DR or HA
-> Production in the cloud with DR in the cloud.
-> Production in the cloud with HA in the cloud.

Managed services can be added to any of the above at various levels.

And of course there could be multiple partitions in play or even X86 Windows/Linux servers, does your provider support that? Some of these need to be 'Very Close' to IBM i to perform well.

Questions you want to know the answers to:

Does your provided actively support IBM i, or are they a generic hosting provider? If your business runs primarily on IBM i, you probably want the system with someone with true IBM i skills that also knows Power Systems servers!

What connectivity to you need to the provider and how is that configured. This is SO KEY and MUST be understood. This is NOT a yes/no, it's a conversation!

We recently identified a cloud provider that does NO CONNECTIVITY! In such a case you would need to acquire network connections to that facility, networking gear, and manage it as well! (We were surprised at this!)

What level of redundancy does the provider have for power, cooling, facilities, servers, storage, networking, etc.

What level of support is available from your provider and how do you contact them? What are their hours? (Note, in some cases you can purchase different coverage hours.)

Does your provider offer IBM i Upgrades and PTFs? Will they manage your backups? Will they let you continue to do these things on your own? Will they Require it?

GENERALLY we find that for small systems, cloud will /generally/ be cheaper. The larger you get the more likely you may find costs are higher.

What version of IBM i do you need? Sure we all want you to be running i 7.5 because it runs on the latest servers which virtualize the best. But what if you actually NEED i 5.4? Can you get that?

How is the cloud migration performed? Do you need to send a box full of USB keys to load your system? Can you just send a SAVE 21 tape? Can you replicate in with software or hardware replication? Can you replicate tapes across and restore from that? What does the cloud cut-over look like.

Some folks whine that they HAVE to have a dashboard to dial up and down resources at a moments notice. We find that nobody in our cloud ever asks. IBM i Generally stay up 24x7 for most users.

No definite positions here but food for thought.

Happy to talk to anyone looking for Cloud resources for their company, or themselves!

</Vendor response>

- Larry