The purpose of this blog is to highlight some of the challenging, unusual IBM i hosting assignments that others have turned away. The unique talents and skills of our experienced senior IBM i engineers makes all the difference.
Disclosure: iSeries and AS400 are IBM servers. IBM i is the operating system. I use them interchangeably to make it easier for people to find this information on the web.
Cloud400 is truly fortunate to have such an experienced and skilled technical team.
Our engineering team members each have a minimum of 20 years’ experience. Several have worked on the IBM AS400 since inception in 1988.
So what?
Well, we have helped several clients that other IBM i hosting companies could not help.
Fortune 500 Pharmaceutical On 1996 9406-640 at V3R7.
In 2013, a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical firm approached us to host their legacy application running on a 9406-620 at V3R7. In case are you not familiar with this IBM AS400 server, it is REAL old (like from the mid 1990’s). IBM OS400 V3R7 was not only old, it was no longer supported.
This pharmaceutical firm explained that they had paid another hosting provider $10,000 for professional services to assess their ability to host this application. The hosting company explained that there was nothing that could be done. And collected $10,000 for this conclusion.
However, when this pharmaceutical company shipped their backup tape to us at V3R7, we were able to upgrade it to V4R4 (for nuanced reasons we could not upgrade this application above V4R4). Within a week of receiving their tape, we were able to demonstrate their server hosted on a supported 9406-270 at our Cloud400 data center.
The pharmaceutical company was favorably amazed. In essence they pondered, “How could a big, better known IBM i hosting provider charge us $10,000 and not be able to host our application, when in less than a week Cloud400 showed us our application hosted at V4R4 as part of their free 60-day trial.”
Needless to say, this pharmaceutical company became a Cloud400 client.
Regional Airline 500 Users In 15 Locations No Downtime Available For Cutover.
In most cases, when a client goes live to Cloud400, they overnight us a Save21 from Friday that we restore on Saturday to go live. In such cases, the client’s IBM POWER server cannot be active so there are no changes to the transaction data until the client goes live on Cloud400.
A regional airline wanted to move their legacy jet parts application from a 9406-520 POWER5 to Cloud400. While the Cloud400 60-Day Free Trial Test was successful, the regional airline’s downtime window did not permit the traditional Save21 overnight approach because they run a 24 x 7 operation.
What to do?
The Cloud400 team implemented a solution to replicate the data from the 9406-520 server to Cloud400. In a matter of days Cloud400 had a mirror copy of that system with current balances.
The regional airlines conducted tests for 2 weeks to validate that both systems were in sync and Cloud400 had a mirror copy of the production environment.
When the time came, Cloud400 moved the 500 users from the 9406-520 to Cloud400 in 5 minutes.
The client was thrilled with the outcome.
Migrate “Legacy” AS400 Server Running Off-Support OS400 To Cloud.
Not all our Cloud400 clients move to a hosted environment from currently supported IBM i OS. We have helped many clients move from V5R1 to V5R4 as well as upgrade to V7.2/3.
Perhaps the most dramatic upgrade involved a business that provided content and pricing analysis for the construction industry. This business ran its operation on a 9402-200 supported by OS400 V3.2, a version of OS400 from the mid-1990s.
With a combination of our older AS400s and iSeries in our warehouse, our library of IBM OS400, i5OS, and IBM i, we were able to upgrade this client’s system from OS400 V3R2 to V7.1 to host on Cloud400.
Fortune 500 IBM iSeries V5R4 User Migrates 3 Production LPARs, 3 MIMIX Target LPARs, and 4 Test/Dev LPARs To Cloud400.
After successfully vetting and testing Cloud400, a Fortune 500 IBM iSeries user at V5R4 decided to move their 10 LPARs on 3 servers (9406-S20, 9406-810 and 9406-825) to Cloud400.
Adding to the challenge was that all of the LPARs must remain at IBM i V5R4. In addition, three (3) production LPARs must continue to replicate to three (3) target LPARs running a legacy version of MIMIX that also must run on V5R4.
While the setup of the (4) Test/Dev LPARs was a straight-forward save and restore to go live, the production and target LPARs required way more planning and implementation. The legacy production and target LPARs had to remain productive. This meant that the production LPARs had to replicate to the legacy LPARs as well as to the new Cloud400 LPARs.
Only after the Fortune 500 technical team validated that the Cloud400 target LPARs were in synch with the legacy environment could the production environment be replicated and validated, and the legacy target LPARs were turned off.
Next the Cloud400 technical team replicated the legacy production LPARs to the Cloud400 production LPARs. Once the Cloud400 production LPARS were loaded and in synch with the legacy production environment, the Fortune 500 team tested and validated the Cloud400 production LPARs were ready for the role swap to take over production.
Once approved by the Fortune 500 technical team, Cloud400 production LPARs were active and replicating to the Cloud400 target LPARs and the legacy production server was turned off and taken out of service.
Conclusion
Because of the skill and experience of our talented senior IBM i engineers, Cloud400 can take on the difficult and unusual hosting assignments.
Have a potential hosting need? We can handle almost any challenge put in front of us! Give us a call at 714-593-0387 or email me at blosey@source-data.com.
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