Re: IBM i Cloud Vendors

There is a lot to be said for that additional infrastructure. We are not
cloud. However we store our systems in a colocation facility.
We went from one of our internal sites with:
- A leaky roof
- A generator which looked clean enough to eat off of but parts were aging
out and not doing well on their automatic weekly test cycling
- A UPS which was getting long in the tooth and was in imminent need of
having a few dozen batteries replaced
- Air conditioning issues which included freezing up and overheating in the
coldest weather, etc
To a site with
- redundant power sources
- redundant generators
- redundant UPS
- Great air conditioning (after one upgrade necessitated by one unpleasant
experience)
- Outlets on one side of the rack go to an independent power source, etc
than the outlets on the other side of the rack. Thus the dual power supply
equipment is quite robust.
- Kick butt fire suppression system
- Have to pass through four retinal scanners to get inside.
- Independent people who come down on you like the wrath of Khan if you
leave a fire hazard around, including so much as a cardboard box full of
parts. To be nice they offered me a free alternative box.
- Gated community with restricted access. Which, after having looked down
the business end of a firearm in the old building while on a speaker call
with IBM support, is kind of nice. Luckily it was the police doing a door
check. Needless to say, I never left the door unlocked again while working
late at night. Hmm, this has a lot of parallels with how people secure
their system. The gal from IBM was quite calm. This has happened to her
before, normally it was the company security guards.

On Wed, Dec 4, 2024 at 4:37 PM Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis <
midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I disagree with the 10 times cost!!

Clearly the cloud vendor is in business to make money, let's be honest!
Additionally most cloud vendors server, storage, networking, power and
other bits are done to a higher standard than the average IBM i shop
that I've visited over the years. That additional resiliency brings with
it additional cost.

A year ago if a customer has say 5 cores licensed and wanted to upgrade
to Power10 for example, they would transfer licenses and pay SWMA and
the hardware bits and off they went. To move to cloud the cloud vendor
would need to acquire 5 additional cores of IBM i, plus SWMA etc so
that's a lot of cost there to make up that the customer has already
incurred perhaps decades ago.

But today that customer now steps into term licensing and oddly enough
the cloud vendor would be doing the same thing! This makes a move to
cloud much more cost effective even for customers with many IBM i cores.

Then there are so many other factors like staffing, knowledge, etc.
Cloud is not for everyone, that is clear, but even for many big
customers it works and we see that line moving up every year.

- DrF

On 12/4/2024 4:05 PM, Nathan Andelin wrote:

We recently configured an IBM i VM at https://cloud.ibm.com/ costing

$425

per month for .25 of a Power 9 core. We've also had discussions with

other

cloud providers. The cost of cloud virtual-machine environments seems to
come out at about 10 times higher than the cost of on-premise

environments

in terms of price per CPW. So it appears to me that cloud environments

are

not practical for "large" IBM i environments.



On Tue, Dec 3, 2024 at 1:16 PM Driver, Adam via MIDRANGE-L <
midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Everyone,

We're in the very early stages of planning and evaluation, and we're
looking for a list of potential cloud vendors for a (Large) IBM i
environment. We are considering the following solutions:

- Hosted
- Full cloud
- Hybrid (Hosted/Cloud) and Hybrid (On prem./Cloud)

So, any suggestions welcome, as well as thoughts and experience,

including

ease of migration from on prem.

Thanks in advance!


*Adam Driver*
*Senior IBM i Engineer*


1250 Techny Road
Northbrook, IL 60062
Cell: 224.250.9049
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