Re: Cloud based IBM i

(Vendor response)

Rob - this is not possible to answer in a short mail, because everything depends on

- the capabilities of the provider
- the request of the customer
- and all in between

There DO exist providers who can only run a server by providing electric power, internet and other infrastructure. They do not know about Firmware, PTF or operating system. So there will be other parties involved in each process.

There DO exist providers who know about IBM i and Power firmware, but usually the hardware and infrastructure is on IBM (or 3rd party) maintenance.

There also DO exist providers who know about IBM i software and hardware and do hardware service, because they must run old iron (for whatever reason) where IBM does not provide hardware service any longer.

And then there is the customer: some customers want the provider to run hardware and infrastructure up to the OS and take care about the application themselves.

Other customers just want to have the application hosted, regardless of the iron (consider SAP / SAP HANA hosting) - they simply are not interested in the system their application runs on.

And there are customers who want to have their own server, their own server and just want to have the provider run the box somewhere.

... there is so much about details and negotiations - i think it is not possible to answer all questions in a mailing list post which usually are written into a big contract ;-)

-h

Am 22.01.2020 um 13:42 schrieb Rob Berendt <rob@xxxxxxxxx>:

With cloud based IBM i available from a number of providers, and more on the way, I wonder how some of this works. For example I am reading one provider provides the data center space but " IBM will be responsible for maintaining all the hardware, firmware, and system software in the ... data center. The customer, meanwhile, will be responsible for maintaining everything from the operating system on up. That means that IBM will apply firmware updates, but it's the customer's job to apply operating systems PTFs and to run backups.".
The data center mentioned has no external replication (yet) to a remote DC. And I wouldn't want to assume they replicate locally.

When they do a disruptive firmware upgrade do they just say plan on an outage at this date/time? I assume that even if you have wonderful replication you can expect a 5250 session to drop, and a disruption in a file transfer. Me, I could accept that. Even my bank posts on their site when they are planning outages. And it's not some local mom & pop bank.

Do they keep hardware forever? Let's say you're one of those customers who wants to continue running 7.3 even when it becomes obsolete and no longer supported on newer hardware, or does something asinine like drop support for Infor. Does the provider say "tough cookie, we're upgrading to this model of hardware with this serial number which supports only these versions of OS and y'all better have a plan to be ready"?