With support steadily growing for multi-cloud, the strategy of using the right cloud for the right workload, enterprises are increasingly turning their focus to specialized cloud providers that can support their unique needs. Simon Sharwood at The Register pointed out this week that these providers can be “more interesting than the mainstream,” and “history tells us none of the big four will dominate forever and that niches matter.”
One growing (and previously unaddressed) enterprise need is cloud support for AIX applications running on IBM Power Systems hardware. These applications have supported core business functionality for decades, and have recently been supported by Skytap Cloud, enabling their inclusion in enterprise cloud roadmaps.
Below are six use cases from five real companies that are driving enterprise innovation and business value from AIX in the cloud.
Cloud Migration
A national mortgage provider runs 80% of their primary, customer-facing business applications on AIX, with the remaining 20% spread across Windows and Linux. The business uses AWS as a cloud provider for part of their application portfolio but needed a way to move the remaining majority of applications off-premises. Using AWS, the business would be required to replatform these applications off of AIX, an endeavor that would take years and be extremely risky. Skytap Cloud natively supports AIX on IBM Power Systems, enabling this business to quickly move large AIX environments to the cloud.
Disaster Recovery
A major media and entertainment company’s customer-facing website is one of its core product offerings and is comprised of both x86 and Power/AIX VMs. Building out an additional datacenter for a disaster recovery site creates expensive overhead. The IT team prefers a simple rehosting solution to create a disaster recovery site in the cloud, but a move to clouds like AWS requires the team to port off of AIX and replatform their Oracle database to x86. Skytap Cloud enables the company to migrate the AIX application unchanged, keep its Oracle databases on AIX, and create a live disaster recovery site that’s synchronized with what’s running in production on the primary website.
SaaS Software
An independent software vendor provides an interactive voice response (IVR) platform to the call centers operated by major telecoms and banks. The company offers its mid-market customers a SaaS solution running on AIX, but its enterprise solution required customers to purchase, license, stand up, and maintain/patch hardware. Now the company is able to offer an AIX-based SaaS product for its enterprise customers, running on Skytap Cloud infrastructure.
Increased Throughput
The company is also empowered to release higher quality software and accelerate the delivery of new functionality in its product offering. Skytap Cloud increases engineering throughput by giving applications teams self-service, on-demand access to development and test environments. This level of access enables teams to eliminate environment configuration and provisioning constraints, enabling them to release better software faster.
Agile Development
One of the world’s largest multi-national retailers wants to drive global revenue growth in the highly-competitive retail market by accelerating the implementation of innovative customer-facing services. But application teams were anchored by slow provisioning times. The wait time for development and test environments for a critical AIX database was three months using on-premises infrastructure and provisioning processes, resulting in a lengthy, nine-month release cycle. In Skytap Cloud, IT is able to configure AIX environments just once, then save them as templates that can be cloned and provisioned with globally distributed teams in minutes, eliminating provisioning bottlenecks and accelerating the application delivery lifecycle.
Remote Production with Decreased Latency
A global hospitality conglomerate powers their primary booking application with an Informix database running on AIX. As the business aggressively pursues global expansion in a web-first consumer world, it needs to be able to deliver price and availability search results to third-party booking platforms immediately as queries from consumers are made. To achieve this, the business needs its database to be readily available in the geographic region its partner operates in. The organization evaluated two options: a) rewrite and/or rearchitect their application, and introduce significant costs and risk by doing so, or, b) explore colocation options that would require significant costs in securing a location, purchasing and standing up physical hardware, and maintaining support. With Skytap Cloud, the enterprise is able to migrate a read-only, exact copy of their database to Skytap Cloud datacenters, giving the company a much lower-price point than colocation, and much closer data location to their customers in the global region they reside.
Learn more about Skytap Cloud’s ability to rapidly migrate applications running on AIX. We also invite you to sign up for a custom demo to see how Skytap Cloud benefits dev/test and operations teams looking to extend cloud-native services and technologies to their most critical applications.
