Re: IBM i hosting "in the cloud"

We had a similar conversation at the YiPs roundtable discussion. The real issue here is the licensing model that IBM has put together. If it was *purely* user based, regardless of LPAR, you might be able to put something together but it would have to be a "floating" user price. If you had a fixed "floating" user price, regardless of LPAR, you could spin up plenty of LPAR's quickly. When we were testing 7.1, it was ridiculously easy to create and delete LPAR's using the IVM.

I think you could create a business model that could make this viable but it would take some concessions from IBM and a "fence" around the development activities on the user LPAR. It will be interesting to see what IBM will come up with from our YiPs discussion. Steve Will seemed pretty interesting in getting something resolved for the YiPs. Whether that could be extended into the general business community, I don't know.

As an ISV, IBM makes it very affordable to get a "development only" machine. I don't think that the whole "cloud on i" concept for a businesses hosting development and production activities has made much of an impact in mindshare at IBM, yet.

Pete


On 5/12/2010 7:46 AM, Aaron Bartell wrote:

One of the things that I feel is causing a decline in our midrange
community, and IBMi in general, is *easy* access to the IBMi OS for hobby
type programmers. Today's hobby programmers are tomorrows ISVs that will
build applications to give IBMi its lifeblood.

I have recently started searching for providers that offer "IBMi in the
cloud" hosting. Basically I am wanting to find companies that offer
*small(er)* virtual IBMi LPARs that I can lease on a monthly basis. I
learned of a couple of companies that do in fact offer IBMi hosted solutions
in a data center environment. I have only communicated with one so far, but
I was quite surprised by how much it would cost to have them host an IBMi
machine. Here are two pricing scenarios from one vendor:

*Scenario 1:* For them to host an IBMi that I already own it would be
$2000-$2500/month. This includes a lot of things like tape backup, data
center location, unlimited bandwidth, 24/7 support.

*Scenario 2*: This is where they purchase all the hardware/software (just
OS, DB and ILE compilers in my case) for you and you pay a monthly fee and
agree to a 3yr commitment. The price for this is an ADDTIONAL $2500/mnth on
top of scenario #1 for a total montly cost of $4500 to $5000/mth.

These costs aren't the worst if you are a well established company because
you can get A LOT of horse power out of a v7.1 520 machine and not requiring
a dedicated sys admin. But this is way to cost prohibitive for a start-up
ISV that hopes to sell a piece of IBMi software for the first time, or for
the hobby developer that wants to host their own website.

*Contrast that with my current scenario as an ISV* where I am leasing a v6.1
entry level 520 for roughly *$170/month *which is a very reasonable amount
for a company that has a 5yr old RPG product. The only reason I am able to
get a machine that reasonable is because I get the necessary software for
50% off (i.e. RPG compilers and such) and the rest of the machine at 1 to 2%
of the total cost per month in a lease form.

I know there are a handful of timeshare services out there that offer you a
couple libraries and profiles for $20 to $50 per month, but those are VERY
restrictive (personal experience) in what they allow you to do.

In the end I am more researching to see if there are "IBMi in the cloud"
type hosting companies out there that would lease on a monthly basis at a
reasonable price (i.e. $50 to $100 per month) for an entry level LPAR. To
set the stage, here are some numbers from the hosting provider Krengel Tech
uses for a number of things (though we have a dedicated server vs. a shared
server): http://hosting.com/cloudhosting/vps/ ($55 to $65 per month)

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/