Join Us For The IBM i On The Public Cloud Webinar
December 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan
After so many years of waiting, it looks like IBM i shops are going to have a wide variety of options when it comes to acquiring true cloud computing to either replace or augment their on premises systems.
IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Skytap all are offing slices of Power9 machines, which complement the cloudy and hosted infrastructure that has been available for a number of years from Connectria, iInTheCloud, UCG Technologies, LightEdge Solutions, Data Storage Corp, Source Data Products, Secure Information and Services, and First Option IT have offerings that fall on the spectrum from traditional hosting to cloud as well. There is clearly a lot going on here, after a decade and a half of waiting for what I used to call “utility computing” before Amazon Web Services uncloaked from stealth back in March 2006 and everyone started using its “cloud” metaphor.
On December 5 at 1 p.m. Eastern, we will be participating in a webinar being hosted by John Blair, founder and president of Blair Technology Solutions, to talk about all things cloud as they relate to the IBM i platform. We did a profile of Blair Technology back in early November, and the company is offering services layers on top of the public cloud offerings from IBM, Google, and Microsoft, which is partnering with Skytap because of the IBM i expertise that it has developed over several years.
The webinar will go over the current state of the cloud for IBM i as well as go over the various scenarios where cloud capacity makes sense initially for customers – disaster recovery and high availability are the obvious starting points for IBM i shops – and how this expands out to either running test/development in the cloud or moving applications wholesale to a public cloud and getting rid of on premises iron entirely. This is not a cheap option from an operational perspective, but it does add flexibility and that is worth something. We will also talk about the various assessment, migration services, and managed services that are layered on top of these public cloud offerings. There is still plenty of stuff that the big public clouds don’t do for IBM i shops that a service provider like Blair Technology can fill in the gaps for. And rapid templating, something that Skytap has been doing, is also a key feature. Everything we said about IBM i also applies to AIX, of course.
The IBM Power on Public Cloud webinar will last for 45 minutes, including plenty of time for question and answer from the audience. You can sign up for the live webinar at this link, and we hope that you will do so. We look forward to sharing our thoughts about IBM i on the cloud and hearing yours.
