A Year Later: Diving Deeper into How Connectria Brings IBM i Workloads Closer to AWS
November 17, 2021 David Wilderman
Connectria has worked in the IBM i and AIX hosting business since 2000. We have strong expertise in both IBM and cloud; we’ve offered IBM i private cloud services and support for more than a decade. We work with a great deal of Power Systems users who are making strides toward the cloud, as many have in the last year thanks to soaring cloud demand in the wake of the pandemic.
Traditionally, we have helped IBM users by augmenting their existing staff as they retire or turnover by handling production workloads and delivering managed services with capability, not just hardware.
This time last year, we unveiled news about our new hybrid cloud offering which delivers ultra-low latency connection between our hosted IBM i and AIX environments and Amazon Web Services datacenters. A lot can happen in a year. Picking up where we left off, we can now dive a bit deeper into how this solution can work for you.
Connectria’s newest datacenter space, located in close proximity to AWS datacenters, helped address the primary challenge around latency and its impacts on application usability. These datacenters in US-East-1 and US-West-1 regions were carefully chosen to address the primary cause of latency which is distance. Having Power Systems physically next to a public cloud provider reduces the impact of latency on end-user applications. While our hybrid architecture doesn’t mean we have AWS running Power Systems hardware, it does offer new opportunities for IBM users.
The diagram above depicts some of the capabilities and features within the datacenter. The public hyperscale clouds can be connected to our datacenter with less than 2 milliseconds of latency into each of the availability zones within each provider. Connectria provides this connectivity as a managed service and can size as needed to your environment. Our connectivity from the datacenter into these providers can be sized from 50 megabits all the way to the maximum that each provider will allow.
One of the primary benefits of this solution is users’ new ability to take advantage of advanced data analytics and to leverage AWS’s capability to deliver multi-region high availability. It also creates an ideal foundation for longer-term cloud migration goals, without refactoring IBM workloads.
Whether we are supporting users in their datacenters, in our datacenters, or helping them embrace the cloud, we are proud to serve users in whatever capacity they like. Our unique value proposition provides a path for those that haven’t found a way around on-premises data center business. We are pleased to provide an option for users to connect on and discuss our available options around solving for their IBM i environments.
“Connectria’s hybrid cloud offering provides a unique and simplified path forward for IBM and AIX shops looking to migrate their systems to the cloud,” said Troy Mitchell, Connectria director of strategic alliances.
Connectria provides IBM i and AIX customers a reliable, fully managed hosting solution. From an augmentation lens, we take an X86 platform that already runs on AWS and make it run and scale better, by simplifying all the things that were hard to do in your on-premise data center.
Our hybrid cloud offering provides migration and modernization pathways for IBM i and AIX customers looking to modernize mission-critical workloads over time with less risk. It provides opportunities to augment existing traditional applications in new ways or develop new applications that wish to leverage existing processes and data. Years of historical business transactions for massive amounts of users is quite common for Power systems users, and there are strong advantages for business who wish to benefit from this data.
We have worked diligently in exploring the possibilities for connecting AWS and IBM i and AIX workloads. In this pursuit, we launched TRiA which allows customers to manage their hosted Power Systems environments using the same screens and management tools that they use to manage AWS. TRiA, brings our hybrid solution together under a single pane of glass. This platform provides performance management, security, compliance, and cost-optimization across AWS and IBM Power Systems environments from a single interface.
Connectria is not a Power-only shop, but we are the largest IBM i cloud provider in North America, as well as so much more. As a leading provider of IBM i/AIX managed services and cloud hosting, we can help you maximize your investment with full remote administration, batch job support, backup and disaster recovery, cloud migration, and more. We combine strategy, migration, managed services, and modernization capabilities to deliver holistic solutions for complex infrastructure challenges.
“What Connectria does is agnostic. We’re focused on supporting you where you currently are and helping you get to where you want to be,” says Jeff Swartz, Connectria regional director. Our expertise and commitment to the Power Systems platform speaks for itself. We remain dedicated to supporting IBM users while also leading hybrid initiatives for IBM modernization. Interest around our hybrid solution has been high and we’re currently onboarding many customers, with case studies and use case analyses to come in 2022.
Ultimately, we aim to take the complexity out of managing your environments, so your team can focus on innovation instead of just managing your infrastructure day in and day out. We support you today so you can look towards tomorrow and beyond.
The best part is that we can support you however you are most comfortable whether that is in your datacenter, in our data center, or in a data center in close proximity to AWS. No matter how you slice it, we can support you.
David Wilderman is vice president of solutions architecture at Connectria.
This content is sponsored by Connectria.
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