Re: Midrange on IBM Cloud?

Hey Larry!

hope you are doing well!

We have been working on IBM i migrations to the cloud (IBM PowerVS and Skytap) and I think it is not for everyone, beyond the hype, but have a lot of good and interesting points:

1) *Cost*: Depends on your business. If you are running on certified Tier IV datacenters , can be less than a 3 year lease. For small shops with a tower box and/or less than 1 core could be more expensive. I can suggest you will pay an average of 10% variation on any direction. For big customers, there are some cloud providers reducing their costs when you power down your LPARs, so you can get an interesting cost cut.
I suggest to contact a couple of vendors to get different quotes (some of them use different algorithms). You can also reduce your operational costs when using less DC space.

2) *Benefits from going to IBM cloud:* I can mention a couple of them

* Flexible infrastructure : Need a PoC? Just provision your server in less than 2 hours, run your tests and destroy to stop paying for that instance. Need more CPU? Just add when required.
* Less DC space usage
* Spare servers (sometimes you get automatic HA at the same cost): If the box hosting your LPAR has trouble or maintenance you can start working on a different box at no extra-cost.
* APIs to manage your infrastructure and billing items: this can help you to control your project budgets.
* When you have workloads running  on the cloud, migrating your midrange systems can help you reduce latency between your VMs-LPARs-Services-Instances.
* Server availability anytime: Don't wait for servers to be shipped to your locations.
* Almost unlimited and instant storage provisioning: You can add more storage whenever you want, without delivery times.
* Easy DR deployment: Most vendors include DR solutions to the cloud mix.

3) *Any other thoughts?*

* Running midrange on the cloud could be great and reduce operational costs. But same as the golden hammer , one size does not fit all needs.
* Most vendors provides only async replication, but latency prevents to use sync replicas.
* You need to think about the big picture. Latency won't take effects with your green screen programs, but could change the way you connect to old client/server systems or require a remediation project,and the side costs could change the budget for your project.
* You need proper communications
* I suggest to map external services to the LPARs.

This is just a small glimpse about this topic, hope that can help you