Connectria’s award-winning IBM Power Systems cloud is now available in a hybrid cloud architecture. Our most recent webinar discussed how running IBM Power Systems workloads on-net with AWS creates an ideal foundation for your long-term cloud adoption goals. In this article, we’ll help you understand more about our hybrid architecture. Check out the questions below from the webinar to learn more about what our hybrid solution can do for you.

Watch the webinar here 

How would I get started with disaster recovery using Connectria’s Power System?

Once you engage Connectria we can start by providing an initial assessment of your environment. During the discovery phase of the engagement, we’ll ask some questions about your resources and your disaster recovery goals (RPO/RTO). Resources are typically the number of cores entitled, the amount of RAM, and the amount of disk that is associated with each of the LPARs and their operating system and version. During the initial call/meetings we will ask some deeper questions like:

• What Power Systems frame type/model are you running on today?
• What disk subsystem is the Power Systems connected to?
• How much bandwidth do you have available from your current data center?
• Are you currently using any logical replication software tools?
• Do you have any x86 virtual machines which need DR with the Power Systems LPAR(s)?

We ask questions like this because your answers will help develop the solution that we will provide to achieve your RPO/RTO goals. Following our assessment of your environment, you’ll go through a standard sales process. At that point, Connectria will take over a lot of the activities. Our team will create the LPAR and any VPN tunnels, we will handle a lot of the networking components. We’ll also implement or assist you with the implementation of any logical replication software.

In terms of the x86 environment, it’s a similar process but we can also perform additional activities. If you’re looking to have Connectria provide managed services, in terms of AWS, we can provide managed services around setting up an AWS account, networking, and any of the other components within the AWS environment. We can identify what tool or tools would be best to replicate your environment into AWS. Then, we can take your existing runbooks or develop runbooks for both the Power Systems and the x86 environment. Next, we’ll establish things like startup order, what things need to happen, or what things need to be checked in order to make sure that the environment is running as expected. We can start wherever you’d like, providing as little or as much managed services in the environment as desired.

What if I decide to move the entire environment to Connectria?

Similar to the process for setting up disaster recovery we can migrate your environment to a Connectria data center. During the discovery and assessment phases, we’ll establish what are acceptable outage windows to move the environment from the current on-premises facility to our facility. Based on what the outage windows are, we can select either a tape restore or a logical replication mechanism to move the data. The tape restore can be either actual physical tape or a virtual tape library (VTL) using replication to our facilities. We will work with you to establish what options are available and which works best for you.

What options are available for logical replication?

We can work with vendors to provide either 30-day, 60-day, or even 90-day licenses for software versus having to buy a perpetual license software to perform that replication. Once we have the replication going, then we can develop our migration runbook and define what steps need to happen in order to bring up the system in our data center.

How does Connectria help with the migration?

There are several distinct phases in the migration process. In most cases, you start off with a discovery and assessment phase where you look at your whole environment. Here, you see what is in the environment, specifically to assess levels of complexity and what pieces need to be in place for the production environment and optionally, the disaster recovery (DR) environment in the migration.

Next, we would implement all of the necessary components for DR. This would include setting up the replication from the source location into the Connectria data center and then working with you hand in hand to define a cutover period and any testing that needs to happen prior.

Once everything is moved and your entire environment is with Connectria, we get to a point we call steady-state. This is where you’re running in the environment and everything is working as it should. In terms of AWS, there are some opportunities for our professional services team to step in and help with refactoring. Here, we may be able to use some of the platform as a service (PaaS) components. We may also be able to use other things to help you realize additional cost savings.

Connectria has a lot of experience in all the phases up to and including steady state. Oftentimes, a lot of organizations lean on us for our managed services and migration services. Typically, we like to be heavily involved in any process. Have deeper questions? Contact one of our experts for a one-on-one conversation to talk through things you’d like to understand a little bit more.

If I already work with an AWS partner who doesn’t support IBM, can I still work with Connectria?

The short answer is yes, we’re very partner friendly! Connectria works with a lot of partners. I think it’s important to realize that while we have a specialized skill set in and around IBM, there may be some overlap in terms of competencies or additional things that we can provide with another partner. We’re happy to come alongside any partner and provide the IBM specialty services in terms of assessment, migration, and support while your preexisting partner manages the rest of your AWS environment. We are pretty flexible and willing to work with any partner.

Still, have questions about our hybrid architecture? Fill out the form below to contact one of our experts.