Getting Ready for IBM i Cloud Migrations
February 15, 2023 Alex Woodie
Interest in the cloud is growing at the moment as IBM i shops put all their run-time options on the table. However, customers who decide to move IBM i workloads to the cloud often don’t have a firm grasp on everything that goes into such a migration. There’s a lot of prep work that needs to be done, and too many shops are not ready when moving day arrives.
Many IBM i shops are considering a move to the cloud, according to the 2023 IBM i Marketplace Study from Fortra (formerly HelpSystems). The report showed that cloud migrations moved from number 10 on the list of top concerns last year to number eight this year, which is one indication. About 12 percent of IBM i shops say they’re looking to move to the cloud, which is greater than the percentage of shops (11 percent) that say they’re planning to migrate off IBM i. (And even among shops that are planning an exit from IBM i, “the cloud” was the number one destination, followed by Windows and Linux).
It’s no great surprise that private IBM i clouds are growing, given the enormous growth in recent years of public cloud platforms from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in recent years. The COVID pandemic spurred many companies to move their Windows and Linux workloads onto the public cloud, and now they’re looking to do the same with their Power estates, including IBM i, AIX, and Linux.
However, we are very early in the migration to private IBM i clouds, and there’s quite a bit of education needed in the market to get IBM i professionals up-to-speed on what the private cloud environments can offer, according to the folks at CloudFirst, an IBM i managed service provider (MSP) and private cloud hosting company based in Melville, New York.
“We have found that, in many cases, there was a lot of confusion within the organization,” says CloudFirst President Hal Scwhartz. “We get to the stage where they’re ready onboard, and there’s much confusion. And the process to onboard these guys was taking three to six months because of the massive confusion on their end.”
IBM i professionals may be well-versed in upgrading to new Power boxes or even have experience with moving data centers. But very often, they’re ill-prepared to cope with some of the details and nuances involved with migrating to an IBM i cloud, says Chuck Paolillo, CloudFirst’s EVP and CTO.
“A lot of times it’s just because of internal communication at a client,” Paolillo says. “The people we’re dealing with, they know the system inside and out. They’re the technical team. They’re aware of everything. But the business wasn’t really prepared. They weren’t really up to speed on what else was going to change within the environment. A lot of times there’s separation between the IBM i team and the network group and the Intel people that have to get whatever changes made on all the desktops. Sometimes they are working close together, but not always and more often not right.”
After experiencing this issue several times, the folks at CloudFirst decided to do something about. They decided that their customers needed more education about some of the finer points of an IBM i cloud migration, so they wrote a document called “Getting Read for IBM i on CloudFirst” to help them prepare for the migrations.
The document provides an array of good advice for companies that are planning to move one or more IBM i environments into a cloud setting. It covers topics such as inventorying existing applications; reviewing software licenses and license keys; system backups; and integration concerns. It encourages users to think about network concerns, bandwidth, help desk, and time commitments.
Security is also discussed. Are clients using NetServer? Are employees working from home? Do they need VPN access? There are a lot of little details that can get lost in the shuffle, and this document can help keep customers on the straight and narrow with guides, check-lists and to-do lists.
The original intent of the document was to better prepare CloudFirst customers who had already made the decision to move to the cloud for the actual work required to execute the migration. But after company officials wrote it, they realized that the 32-page document would also be useful as a study guide of sorts for the entire IBM i community, no matter what cloud they’re moving to.
“It educates them and it allows them to make better, more informed decisions more quickly, which is what businesses want,” Schwartz tells IT Jungle. “It gives them some assurances as to how the process is going to go, some insight. What I say is it takes a lot of the mystery out of it. That’s the thing – people don’t make decisions when they don’t feel comfortable that they really know what they’re doing. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid here.”
The sorts of things that trip IBM i shops on their journey to the cloud are not what you might expect. The customers typically do their homework on the big items. They’re able to locate an IBM i cloud service that meets their capacity needs at a price that they can afford, Paolillo says. It’s the little things that IBM i shops often overlook, which sometimes trip them up when the migration day nears.
CloudFirst provides a series of checklists and to-do lists to help IBM i shops prepare for a migration to the cloud.
“You’d be surprised what some of them run into, where they’re not prepared with their licensing on their third-party applications,” Paolillo says. “Obviously most cloud providers, us included, cover the IBM side of the licensing. So their systems license. Usually the major [third-party software licenses] they know about and are prepared for. But there’s some other little piece that did a printer function or something else that they missed and didn’t get the keys for.”
Networking issues are another common bugaboo that can trip up an otherwise orderly cloud migration.
“Maybe there’s something else required for the network, and it’s a little more complicated than just firing up a VPN and getting the office connected,” Paolillo says. “There’s more to it. They need some public facing IPs, they need some firewall rules, and different things. So we have to engage the network team and get a little more intricate depth, which are all things that we handle. We help them through, and they’re addressed in this document.”
Often, the issues end up being delays and inconveniences rather than roadblocks or deal-breakers. The migration may take three months longer than originally anticipated. But occasionally, when too many little things pile up, the poor planning can tip the scales in favor of the “do nothing,” and the decision-maker kills the project.
It’s all about realigning expectations and making sure there are no surprises, Schwartz says.
“Keep in mind, they’re not in the business of migrating their systems to the cloud,” he says of IBM i shops moving to the cloud. “All their employees have roles and responsibilities that don’t have anything to do with migrating to the cloud. None of them are employees have that as this role and responsibility. So everybody’s got pulled away from their [regular job]. So when we get down to a very limited time frame, it’s like, alright, I got to get the networking team to do this. I got to get the license key. This guy’s got to spend time with the application vendors to get all the licensing straightened out. So it’s finding the time.”
CloudFirst wrote the document with its own cloud in mind, naturally, but the pointers are still valid for 95 percent of other clouds, Schwartz says.
You can access the document at CloudFirst’s website at www.cloudfirst.host.
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