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May 3, 2022Jason Hardy

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 its because the thought of migration and downtime is just completely overwhelming to you? While I dont have an answer to the first two reasons above, Im 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 dont 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.

So how do you execute a simple and smooth migration to the cloud?

Start off by talking to your potential cloud service provider and asking questions about how they do migrations. An experienced provider should have a tried-and-true process that is designed to minimize downtime and the impact on your staff and business. We have done migrations for many companies in various industries and what we have found is that while everyone has some unique requirements, the core requirements remain the same.

Heres how we tackle migrations:

How long does this take? We typically tell companies that it is a two- to three-week process, but the reality is the majority of that time is allocated to customers for testing. Recently, we got a call from a company that hadnt done an upgrade in 20 years and its on-premise server had crashed. We were able to get them up and running on the cloud in a matter of days, restoring all their data from backups.

As mentioned above, the migration is a good time do PTF installs and OS upgrades. We often find that due to the investment in time and effort, companies dread making operating system upgrades and their servers are not current. When Racksquared is building the new environment, its the perfect time to upgrade to the current releases. We work with customers to help them assess what is necessary to get your server up to date and help you review changes on the new server so you can be comfortable before cutting over.

Moving from an on-premises server to the cloud can seem daunting and is definitely a shift in your paradigm. But with the right approach, the actual moment that the switch happens can be anti-climactic. With the environment in place, tested, updated, and confirmed ahead of time, everything is ready to go. Its just a matter of making the final cutover to the cloud environment, a change that end users dont even realize has happened.

When Watsons, a home entertainment retailer, moved to Racksquared cloud servers, its stores didnt even notice the change. Their programmer analyst described it: All the new networking, the new location all of this happened over a weekend. I dont think we experienced any downtime. She even went so far as to call the migration a non-event. Thats exactly the outcome our process was designed to produce. You can read their full story here.

Ready to make a simple, smooth migration to the cloud? Check out our IBM Power Solutions today to learn more,see our client success stories or contact us to schedule a call.

This content was sponsored by Racksquared.

Jason Hardy is director and general manager of Racksquared.

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