Blog

One of the major challenges that customers face for cloud adoption is networking issues, particularly high network latency, which affects how fast data can be transferred from one location to another. These delays are not only frustrating to end-users but are costly to businesses.  Today, Skytap integrates with Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute to provide a standard 1 Gbps […]

IBM i customers on Skytap who run development and test workloads or those who require compilers for their applications when moving to Skytap can now license the Rational Development Tools package self-service from the Skytap Hardware Settings page, Licensing section. Clicking on the Edit icon, users can now specify how many users they’d like to […]

We’re happy to announce that the Skytap on Azure (SoA) Hong Kong region is now available in the Azure Marketplace and hosted in the Azure East Asia data center to help support our APAC customers. Customers may create new Skytap on Azure accounts or add this region to their existing Skytap on Azure accounts. For […]

We have all heard this phrase: “My app can’t be moved to the cloud…..it is based on AIX or IBMi…….” What is implied is that the app owner doesn’t want to re-engineer their application to all use cloud-native services, but instead wants to do a classic lift-and-shift of their application without making any application code […]

The following use cases are potential ways to use the cloud for non-production use cases. The key is to deliver “quickly” the infrastructure needed to perform a specific need or task. Waiting weeks for infrastructure delivery should be considered an “anti-pattern” since the cumulative time of waiting over the course of a project would be […]

As part of cloud and digital transformation initiatives, you may be taking a hard look at how to move your core business applications running on IBM Power Systems to the cloud. There are many reasons to migrate Power workloads to the cloud — improved flexibility and lower risk, cloud-native services that enhance core business applications, […]

Secure Remote Access Client Insert Text Feature  Ever since Skytap launched the Power offering, IBM i customers have been asking for a way to insert long strings of text into the IBM i guest OS. Many command-line statements in IBM i are very long and typing them into the client can be really time-consuming.   […]

The Skytap webhook service is a powerful feature, yet on first glance can be a bit intimidating. A webhook is a method used for one application to talk to another. In our case, the Skytap webhook service can send audit data and usage data to other applications. For example, suppose you want to be notified […]

One of the biggest challenges IBM i (and certain AIX) customers have to deal with is software licensing. The licensing model, adopted by many solutions based on IBM’s Power platform, is steeped in legacy.  You see, back in the day, independent software vendors (ISVs) needed to protect their software from copying and unlicensed use. Before the proliferation of the Internet, there were few effective ways to track software usage.  The most common method […]

Since 2017, IBM has used Skytap to support its Instructor-Led Training (ILT) and sales demo activity for Fast Start. Fast Start is IBM’s annual conference to showcase new product solutions and train its technical seller community and partner network.  This year was the first time IBM ran the event entirely online, which drew more than […]

Migrating to the cloud can be a daunting challenge for businesses worldwide that rely on IBM Power applications. The thought of re-platforming or re-architecting legacy applications for the cloud can be enough to stop a cloud initiative in its tracks. And many organizations that rely on business-critical apps running on IBM hardware have been challenged […]

Keeping up with updates and hotfixes from software vendors can be a challenge, even more so in traditional computing environments like IBM i. Skytap maintains an updated set of public templates for all the versions that are available to customers. At the time of this blog post, Skytap supports IBM i versions 7.2, 7.3, and […]