Cloud Data Migration Service Launched For IBM i
October 3, 2018 Alex Woodie
Companies that want to move data from their IBM i server into the public cloud environment have a new solution available from Accur8 Software, which last week debuted a new data migration as a service (DMaaS) offering based on its integration platform.
According to Accur8 Software, the new Data Migration as a Service (DMaaS) offering provides a way for customers to migrate data from Db2 for i to public cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft and Amazon – as well as Google Cloud Compute, often cited as the third main public cloud platform (the IBM Cloud notwithstanding) – offer a range of pre-built data-related services to customers who store data on their cloud, which normally resides in an object store, such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). This includes data warehousing using an MPP-style database (Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Amazon Redshift, and Google Big Query) and various machine learning offerings.
Accur8’s offering can make Db2 for i data available to these services. Additionally, the company says the DMaaS offering can be useful for companies that have already migrated production workloads off the IBM i and are maintaining the environment only as an archival data store, because they don’t know what else to do with the data.
“We have found that many small to mid-sized companies feel trapped with their IBM i platform, and don’t know how to safely and cost-effectively migrate to the cloud or a newer data environment,” says Ron Patterson, a co-founder and head of business development for Accur8, in a press release. “And a failed or mismanaged data migration can put their business at significant risk. We take that worry off the table.”
IT Jungle readers may remember a vendor profile we ran three years ago on Accur8, which Peterson and Glen Marchesani founded in a Brattleboro, Vermont, in 2014. The company’s main focus up to that point was a data virtualization technology, dubbed the Accur8 Integration Engine, that could be used to streamline access to databases, including (but not limited to) Db2 for i.
Since then, the company has launched several new offerings based on that data virtualization technology, which was developed to account for the unique data way that customers and applications store data, including support for Db2 for i data structures and DDS files. Those offerings include the new DMaaS, which targets Amazon and Microsoft public cloud environments, as well as a data warehousing as a service (DWaaS) offering that was launched previously.
Accur8 understands some of the nuances of the IBM i server and how it stores data, thanks to Marchesani’s familiarity with the platform (he was a lead developer for Seagull Software, among others). To that end, the company touts its bona fides in handling things like DDS tables.
The company says that, as part of its data migration service, it also provides an Accur8 reporting and analytics system for the customer, or will connect to other existing reporting tools. It also pledges to provide ongoing care and maintenance of the cloud data environment, including creating bug fixes, performing data validation routines, and running backups.
I dare Accur8 to find a way to host RPG code in a Serverless Architecture to go along with their data virtualization tech.