Legacy, “something that remains from an earlier time.” This can be a good thing but often when attributed to applications can be deemed problematic, costly and a constraint on progress.
As organisations continue to evolve their digital and cloud strategies so called legacy applications and infrastructures are often ignored or filed in the ‘too hard’ draw. However at L3C we specialise in bringing your legacy IBM AIX and IBM i workloads into a cloud model complementing your public cloud strategy meaning your legacy environments needn’t constrain your evolution.
We can provide a relatively quick business and technical evaluation can help with a roadmap to determine the best approach for your legacy AIX and IBM i applications to improve agility and cost going forward.
From a business perspective do they still fit your business needs and are they adding value? In our experience over 90% of our client conversations result in an overwhelming yes to this. However this is often caveated by a concern over skills, the flexibility of the current environment (which includes costs) and the desire to move to a more consumption based model that allows a scale to zero over time.
From a technical perspective there are concerns around the cost of maintaining these, the perceived complexity (generally due to skilled team members having moved on over time) and an increasing risk (again around platform skills and the robustness of the underlying platform, particularly for older versions).
Options going forward include moving to a cloud provider such as Skytap, IBM PowerVS or one of the other cloud providers for AIX & IBM i, moving to a “hosted” solution with L3C in our tier 3 data centres or of course staying as you are which carries increasing risk (skills and support of the infrastructure, increasing maintenance and support costs). While the applications could be replaced by more modern or even SaaS versions the ‘legacy’ environments still need support in the meantime while replacements are evaluated and often run in parallel for a period of time.
There is the option to re-architect or re-platform meaning they are re-written for another architecture and operating system. While HPUX applications can often be migrated to IBM AIX and all Unix can conceptually be re-written for Linux, source code needs to be available in reality this approach is often deemed too costly and high risk.
However if you are looking to evolve to a cloud environment and a consumption based model for your AIX and IBM i (AS/400) workloads then let’s have an initial conversation on how we can help. No annoying sales people, just understanding your technical, business and commercial requirements.