Earlier this year, I wrote an article entitled The IBM Power Trap that described how a series of decisions related to how you
manage your applications and IBM Power can leave you stuck. A few people reached out to me with questions so I thought it might be appropriate to share a real-life story about one of our customers, we will call them Glass Corp International (GCI), that got caught in this trap and had to be rescued.
IBM 
Power has long been known as a stable, reliable hardware platform and as a result companies have leveraged it to run their most critical business applications. For many, it has become so ingrained in their business that they would never choose to migrate away from it. But for some, IBM Power has become a trap from which they can’t escape. This is not a malicious trap that suddenly jumps up and grabs you but rather a trap that is triggered by a series of decisions made over time with each compounded by the previous. So, what are these decisions that create the trap? At Racksquared Data Centers, we have classified them into three categories, application neglect, operating system ambivalence, and hardware apathy. Let’s look at each of these.
Your business runs on IT and chances are if your systems are down, your business is down. Have you contemplated the 
most common reasons for data loss and whether your strategy can protect you in the event of natural disaster, hardware failure, fire, ransomware, human error or theft? Depending on the reason for your outage, you may experience data loss and need to leverage your backups to recover. Are you confident in your backup and recovery strategy?
One of the simplest tests you can do to assess your backup strategy is to see how you stack up against the 3-2-1 best practices for backups. This requires that you have 3 copies of your data on 2 different media with 1 of them being offsite. When I visit companies and talk to them about their backup strategies, very few are meeting the 3-2-1 best practices.
Read MoreWhy haven’t you made the move to IBM Power in the cloud?
Is it because you like the big upfront capital expense and the depreciating asset? Is it because installing PTFs and doing OS
upgrades gives your IT team something to do during slow times? Or maybe it’s because the thought of migration and downtime is just completely overwhelming to you? While I don’t have an answer to the first two reasons above, I’m here to tell you that a migration does not have to be difficult, and downtime can be practically nonexistent.
I recently spent some time with an IBM reseller, and he walked me through the steps of migrating to one of the “big IBM Power in the cloud service providers”. To say that it was complex, and self-service would be an understatement. I know there are many companies that like the self-service cloud model. Give them an interface and they are happy to configure, manage and tweak the environment on their own but I talk to companies every day that want to walk away from hardware management and don’t want the added burden of planning and executing a migration to the cloud. With their limited iSeries expertise on staff, they are happy to offload the project to someone else.
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In my role, I speak with several companies each week about the prospect of migrating from their on-premise IBM Power
server to our IBM Power Cloud. A common thread that runs through these conversations is a focus on the cost of purchasing and maintaining an on-premise server versus the monthly recurring fee of our cloud based service. Many prospects see this move as a simple lift and shift to cloud infrastructure rather than a modernization strategy.
And while this may be partially true, as most customers are not modernizing their application when migrating, they are overlooking the modernization benefits that the cloud offers to their overall IT strategy. This article will take look at additional benefits that should be considered when contemplating a cloud migration.
What if you could do one thing to save money, gain time for new projects, and protect your business operations?
That’s what many companies gained when they moved their IBM i to the cloud. After weighing the pros and cons, the reasons to migrate to the cloud are too compelling to ignore. See why the cloud is the best environment for your IBM i, and start planning your move today. You’ll be on your way to cost savings, freed-up staff time, and more protection for your business.
After four years on the market, the Power9 processor is in the process of being replaced by the Power10 chip. Whether you
are an early adopter of CPUs or a laggard, the challenge for many companies is the timing of the refresh. As leases on the Power9 machines are expiring, companies are struggling with how to bridge the gap between the end of their current Power9 system lease and the release of the Power10 systems. Their typical options include lease renewals, lease buyouts, or purchasing a new Power9 server, but some companies just want to get out of owning and managing hardware and are taking this opportunity to consider a migration to Power Systems in one of a number of clouds.
The IBM i skills shortage isn’t going away
A shrinking IBM i talent pool has been a major concern for years.
Back in 2015, dwindling access to IBM i professionals was blamed by IBM’s own top brass on revenue shortfalls. A system that had been around for nearly three decades, it was only a matter of time until the veterans left for greener pastures. The problem was, and continues to be, that fewer young professionals have been eager to master the same set of skills.
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Depending on when you read this, you are either seeing the final days of support for the IBM Power7 or that milestone is in your rear view mirror. December 31, 2020 is/was the day IBM finally ended support for all IBM Power7 machines.
The change comes as no surprise. Power7 and Power7+ servers have been around since 2010 and 2012 respectively and IBM long ago published the end-of-life dates. But that doesn’t mean many businesses aren’t scrambling to find a solution. HelpSystems‘ 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey shows that 15 percent of IBM i shops are still running Power6 servers, and 38 percent are running Power7 gear.
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If you are like hundreds of thousands of organizations world-wide, somewhere in an office, warehouse or maybe on the dock sits a black box with a silver IBM logo, chugging along, powering your business’ most critical applications, every minute of every day.
