The Cloud Is Part Of The IBM i Present, And A Bigger Part Of Its Future

February 26, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As obvious as this might sound in hindsight, if you want to get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions in the first place. And as inquisitive communicators, we will be the first ones to admit that this is not always as easy as it sounds.

It is hard to draw the line in the timeline sands for when the first true cloudy instance of a Power Systems machine running a rentable license to the IBM i operating system was announced, but it is safe to say that various hosting providers have been renting out parts of machine, or whole machines, to customers for many decades and it is also safe to say that true cloudy IBM i capacity has been around for a while.

Back in January 2009, we started talking about IBM i and cloudy infrastructure three years after Amazon Web Services showed us all how it is done, and started banging the drum harder in 2011 with Wanted: Cloud-i i-nfrastructure and I, Cloud-i-us, two stories with titles that at the very least amused us. We also reminded everyone that Amazon Web Services was building something as integrated and complete and automated and interesting as the original AS/400 was in AWS/400: Amazon Builds An AS/400-oid Cloud (April 2012) and Microsoft was doing the same in a story called Microsoft Azure: An AS/400 for Private and Public Clouds (July 2010). It took IBM until March 2014 to get Power Systems up in what was then called the SoftLayer cloud and what is now called IBM Cloud, and it was February 2019 before IBM i slices were available in beta on Power iron running in the IBM Cloud, and a few months layer in June this service was rebranded the Power Virtual Server, or PowerVS, and pricing was actually revealed for it.

That’s a gap of 13 years between when AWS launched in March 2006 and when PowerVS was practical. And here in 2024, Big Blue is still working to get the kinks out of its move to subscription pricing for the IBM i stack so the pricing on the systems software can match the pricing on the cloudy infrastructure.

Managed service providers and hosters were impatient for what IBM needed to do to allow the IBM i platform to be truly cloudy, and they figured out their own ways or bought them, including Microsoft/Skytap and Google among the hyperscalers (and Google sorta fizzled out), and Connectria, Fresche Solutions, CloudSAFE, Meridian IT, and myriad others that we have talked about over the years.

And now, the cloud is not the future of the IBM i platforms, but part of its present and if the trends persist, will be part of the hybrid cloud future that Big Blue talks about so much and that hundreds of other MSPs also believe in and are building to as the IBM i base transforms into a mix of on-premises and off-premises capacity for compute and storage.

We just didn’t see it happening because we didn’t start asking the right question until late 2018, when the survey for the IBM i Marketplace report was being put together for early 2019. At that time, of the hundreds of customers surveyed, 83 percent said that their IBM i infrastructure was on premises, 6 percent said that it was on the cloud (a very loose term that clearly means real utility-priced cloud capacity as well as hosting), and 11 percent said it was running both on premises and in the cloud in a hybrid mode. Two years later, the split was 84 percent on premises, 6 percent cloud only, and 10 percent was hybrid – effectively the same answer. And we went back through all of the reports and it was much the same, wiggling up and down. But it has been tipping towards cloud and hybrid.

In the 2022 report, the split was 78 percent on premises, 7 percent cloud only, and 15 percent hybrid. In the 2023 report, the spread was 82 percent on premises, 8 percent cloud only, and 10 percent hybrid, but we might be at a real tipping point here in 2024. Take a look:

This year, on premises only is down to 74 percent, cloud only was 9 percent, and hybrid cloud was 17 percent. Then again, maybe not. A few points here and there are probably not statistically significant.

We will know, I think, that a tipping point has been attained when hybrid cloud is a much larger portion of the base and on premises only is under 50 percent. And we had better start asking the question about hybrid cloud not just being a mix of on premises and cloud, but spanning across multiple clouds as companies try to mitigate their risks by having multiple pools of IBM i compute and storage.

What’s your guess? I am curious.

One last thing: If you missed the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey webinar, you can see the survey results and listen to the commentary from various luminaries here, and if you want to read the written report accompanying the survey results, you can download that there.

One thought on “The Cloud Is Part Of The IBM i Present, And A Bigger Part Of Its Future”

ema tissani says:

February 26, 2024 at 9:32 am

hybrid cloud for IBMi is indeed an interesting scenario, even for simple, straightforward cases, and should be enabled by the software easily.
For example: PowerHA , with the new multitarget additions.
Have a primary machine on-prem under full company control, then push the productions iASP(s) via PowerHA to an cost effective passive cloud LPAR of choice.
In case of problems on prem, one can vary on the remote LPAR easily serving loads (using L2 tunnelling, should even be fully transparent to clients).
Having the iASP copy on cloud, the provider can then enable and sell interesting services like flashcopies, virtual tapes, archiving services, cloning, all managed.
A little work should be done in PowerHA to better expose performance characteristic of an ASYNC replica (better control on transfer windows, reliability over internet conns), avoiding excessive backpressure on primary.

This would keep on prem scenario complexity for mid, small realities to the minimum with lot of benefits; just keep a machine on prem with local fast nvme storage, then push the iASP to the cloud enabling a lot of added managed services, for DR and backup, test…

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