Learning From Experience

June 6, 2016 Dan Burger

I’ve got good news and bad news. I’ll give you the good news first. We’re never too old to learn something new. The bad news? Don’t ever expect to graduate. Learning is a never-ending process, or at least is should be. Taking breaks from learning is a good idea, but calling it quits is not. My mother used to tell me: What counts most is what you allow yourself to learn after you think you know enough.

While attending the COMMON Annual Meeting and Exposition a couple of weeks ago in New Orleans, I met with Kevin Mort and Manzoor Siddiqui. Mort is the immediate past president of COMMON and Siddiqui is the executive director. COMMON, as you may or may not know, is an organization for IBM i professionals. Officially it’s dedicated to IBM Power Systems professionals, but realistically it consists almost entirely of people with careers tied to IBM i. The ambition that pushes COMMON and most professional organizations can be summed up as more education for more people.

The more education part of the equation is the easy part. COMMON has plenty of volunteers who are willing to share their subject matter expertise with the IBM i community. The harder nut to crack is reaching more people. The total attendance figures for the past eight years have hovered around 1,000 to 1,100. That includes 60-plus vendors, most with two to four representatives and some with many more; 100-plus speakers; the volunteer workers; and, of course, those who are there for the continuing education. It’s not a large number compared to the 100,000-plus IBM i installed base.

COMMON wrestles with its goal of reaching more people.

One of its most successful strategies is the virtual conference it’s been organizing and presenting for several years. Attendance at the last virtual conference was more than 1,000. The next one is scheduled in three weeks on June 28. Another one is planned for the end of the year. The virtual conferences are free and COMMON membership is not required to register.

“It allows people who may not know about COMMON to come and see what we have to offer,” Siddiqui says. “It provides value, grows the community, and enhances the careers of our members, while being free for everyone in the IBM i community.”

Both Siddiqui and Mort believe the virtual conference is helping COMMON engage with IBM i professionals who are not members. Budgets for education and training and travel are not what they used to be. A virtual conference is a way to bring value to members as well as non-members who don’t attend the annual conferences. Some audience overlap occurs, but it’s relatively small, Siddiqui says.

One feature that’s been popular with the virtual conference is a chat function that allows attendees instant message with one another and with the session speaker.

The virtual conferences, along with a monthly schedule of webinars and webcasts, put educational programs in front of the COMMON membership (and sometimes the IBM i community at large) every month throughout the year.

Also on the schedule is the annual Fall Conference and Expo, which will be in Columbus, Ohio, October 24-26 this year.

During 2015 COMMON hosted two mini-conferences, one on open source topics and the other on systems management. Those two conferences are being combined at an event scheduled for July 13 and 14 in Chicago. A similar event is in the planning stages, but is expected to take place late this year, probably in December and probably in Southern California.

Bookmark the COMMON Events webpage to keep current on conferences, webcasts, and webinars and for more details.

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Do the Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting for Cost Savings

COVID-19 has accelerated certain business trends that were already gaining strength prior to the start of the pandemic. E-commerce, telehealth, and video conferencing are some of the most obvious examples. One example that may not be as obvious to the general public but has a profound impact on business is the shift in strategy of IBM i infrastructure from traditional, on-premises environments to some form of remote configuration. These remote configurations and all of their variations are broadly referred to in the community as IBM i hosting.

“Hosting” in this context can mean different things to different people, and in general, hosting refers to one of two scenarios. In the first scenario, hosting can refer to a client owned machine that is housed in a co-location facility (commonly called a co-lo for short) where the data center provides traditional system administrator services, relieving the client of administrative and operational responsibilities. In the second scenario, hosting can refer to an MSP owned machine in which partition resources are provided to the client in an on-demand capacity. This scenario allows the client to completely outsource all aspects of Power Systems hardware and the IBM i operating system and database.

The scenario that is best for each business depends on a number of factors and is largely up for debate. In most cases, pursuing hosting purely as a cost saving strategy is a dead end. Furthermore, when you consider all of the costs associated with maintaining and IBM i environment, it is typically not a cost-effective option for the small to midsize market. The most cost-effective approach for these organizations is often a combination of a client owned and maintained system (either on-prem or in a co-lo) with cloud backup and disaster-recovery-as-a-service. Only in some cases of larger enterprise companies can a hosting strategy start to become a potentially cost-effective option.

However, cost savings is just one part of the story. As IBM i expertise becomes scarce and IT resources run tight, the only option for some firms may be to pursue hosting in some capacity. Whatever the driving force for pursing hosting may be, the key point is that it is not just simply an option for running your workload in a different location. There are many details to consider and it is to the best interest of the client to work with an experienced MSP in weighing the benefits and drawbacks of each option. As COVID-19 rolls on, time will tell if IBM i hosting strategies will follow the other strong business trends of the pandemic.

When we say do the math in the title above, it literally means that you need to do the math for your particular scenario. It is not about us doing the math for you, making a case for either staying on premises or for moving to the cloud. There is not one answer, but just different levels of cost to be reckoned which yield different answers. Most IBM i shops have fairly static workloads, at least measured against the larger mix of stuff on the public clouds of the world. How do you measure the value of controlling your own IT fate? That will only be fully recognized at the moment when it is sorely missed the most.

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Article featured in IT Jungle on April 5, 2021