Improved IT agility, global scale, and cost-savings are just a few of the promises that await those moving to the cloud. But getting there can be a long journey, with a different route for each individual company. And, despite digital transformation goals, many still rely on traditional infrastructure—like IBM Power Systems—to run business-critical applications. Trying to leverage the cloud alongside legacy workloads, like the ones running on IBM i or AIX, introduces latency concerns. Complex workload dependencies end up keeping businesses tied to the corporate data center without a clear path to cloud adoption.

Trying to reconcile digital transformation, cloud strategy, and your existing legacy infrastructure is one of the most complex challenges facing IT leaders today. That’s why we launched a new IBM Cloud solution with ultra-low latency connectivity to AWS cloud regions in US-East-1 and US-West-1. By putting our IBM Power Systems cloud on-net with AWS, we’ve opened up new possibilities for augmenting IBM-based applications with cloud-native services, modernizing legacy infrastructure, and accelerating cloud adoption. In this article, we look at three different business use cases driving adoption of an IBM and AWS hybrid cloud architecture.

1. Disaster Recovery

While organizations seeking greater integration between their IBM i and cloud systems may be interested in this new offering, they may not necessarily be ready to jump in with both feet. If this sounds like you, then you’re probably interested in gaining confidence in the cloud while learning about other services. A great starting point in recognizing the benefits of a hybrid architecture, like Connectria’s IBM with AWS hybrid architecture, is with high availability disaster recovery (DR).

Rather than replacing an existing DR, you can connect on ways to make what you have better. With high availability disaster recovery, Connectria fulfills your need for disaster recovery while also setting the perfect foundation for longer-term cloud migration projection enabling you to transition to AWS over time, at your pace. High availability/disaster recovery is among the top concerns in planning an IT environment, according to the HelpSystems 2021 IBM i marketplace survey.

2. Modernization

If you’re like many organizations, the new year has prompted fresh conversations around your modernization strategy approach. While these conversations are not necessarily about moving everything to the cloud right away, they are about moving away from on-prem data center business in various phases.

One of the most prevailing use cases for a hybrid cloud architecture is to support these efforts. Exiting an on-prem data center and moving to another platform takes careful planning and coordination. Most IBM i/AIX based applications are mission-critical and depend on an ultra-low latency connection between IBM Power Systems and the x86 infrastructure in the same data center. For this reason, IBM i/AIX workloads are often seen as an obstacle on the path towards cloud adoption and digital transformation.

How can a hybrid architecture solution help you exit on-prem data center business and move toward AWS? Using over 20+ years of experience managing IBM i systems, Connectria has engineered a low latency hybrid architecture solution that enables the separation of IBM and x86. This enables customers to run their x86 workloads with AWS and their IBM i workloads with Connectria. The hybrid solution opens the door to modernization opportunities of x86 workloads with AWS services, such as advanced data analytics, to improve scale, cost, and performance.

3. Reliability

As your renewal approaches, it’s a good opportunity to reflect on both past performance and future planning, especially if your experience with your current provider hasn’t been the best. For example, we had a client with an environment in AWS for over 10 years. In that time, their environment had minimal interruptions. In contrast, their IBM Cloud experienced a handful of outages over just three years. As their business grew, they needed to ensure their environment was in the right hands, with the right provider and vendors, with the right support. If reliability is your concern, be sure to review:

• Outages
• Outage frequency
• The business impact of any outages

If your environments have gone down, how long have they been down for? How often has this happened? If they’ve gone down for a few hours, what does that cost your business? Been down almost a full day, how confident are you that it won’t happen again? Is there a noticeable reliability difference between your on-prem and cloud environments?

If you find yourself asking these questions, you may start to wonder what it would look like if you were to move your environment(s) to another provider. The reliability of your systems should be congruent with your foreseeable company growth. Essentially, the more you grow, the more important it is to have reliable environments. Connectria can help you make sense of available options to find what is right for you.

Meet Cloud Needs

When you work with AWS and Connectria, you benefit from dedicated and experienced cloud and IBM experts. We take the time to understand your organization’s unique needs while operating as an extension of your IT team. Benefits of Connectria’s hybrid cloud solution include:

• Improved security posture with a fully managed environment and a dedicated SOC and compliance services
• Simplified cloud adoption with a single vendor solution for migration and managed services for both platforms
• Advanced user experiences and cloud-native AWS data analytics services to leverage data stored on IBM Power Systems

Embracing Cloud

Connectria has the experience and skills necessary to assess, migrate, deploy, manage, and automate both IBM and AWS environments. Ultimately, this hybrid architecture provides a solution for IBM workload obstacles. Whether that is focusing on exiting a data center, implementing a DR solution, or improving reliability, our hybrid cloud provides the flexibility to combine Power Systems with AWS.

Want to learn more? Click here to download the solution brief or learn more about our IBM and AWS hybrid architecture, or connect with a solution architect by completing the form below.