Comparing a local AIX/Unix Cloud Provider with an AIX Public Cloud
Many clients have come to us commenting on adverts from mainly North American companies purporting to be AIX public cloud providers and asking if local AIX cloud service providers would provide a more flexible service than the shoehorn approach they have seen.
Certainly by definition a public cloud will have restrictions that prospective users need to be aware of:
- Very low SLA, common to all
- Typically fixed ‘machine/server/virtual’ environments
- Standard maintenance windows irrespective of your business need
- Data can quite often be outside the UK
- No personal relationship between service recipient and service provider (which is critical when changes need to be implemented quickly)
- Not as cost effective as one initially thinks
- No support for older legacy environments that can’t be migrated to the latest infrastructure (there are many AIX workloads based on V5.x that cannot operate on Power8)
- No support for other Unix environments such as Solaris and HPUX
If this is a scenario you can live with then by all means check them out.
However, at L3C, a UK service provider and IBM power cloud partner, we can confidently answer that placing your AIX and Unix workloads in our UK hosted / AIX cloud environment will offer you more flexibility.
Our clients have taken advantage of our AIX cloud and Unix cloud service to:
- Work with us to re-architect their environments to meet current and future business requirements taking advantage of the latest technology when needed but also recognising that some applications just need a more robust underlying n-1 infrastructure.
- Re-visit their SLAs to make sure they are meeting current and future business needs
- Re-visit their DR requirements particularly in respect of RTO/RPO
- Assess their resourcing requirements particularly with respect to Sysadmin and DBAdmin
- Implement a fully hybrid model by connecting from our UK data centres into workloads deployed in AWS, Azure and Bluemix.
With a UK service provider such as L3C you have a wide degree of flexibility with your hosted/cloud environment.
- Custom design to your requirements and business needs (not what fits somebody else’s delivery model)
- Dedicated or shared environments
- Connectivity to your applications in established public clouds such as AWS, Azure and Bluemix
- SLA defined to your needs, not just response time but fix time as well
- Improved DR by implementing a fit for purpose solution using your RPO/RTO requirements
- Support for legacy environments whether older versions of AIX, Solaris or HPUX
- Multiple connectivity solutions
- Ability to complement your Sysadmin or DBAdmin resources if needed
- Ability to host your x86 applications that need to be near your core Unix systems
- A cost effective solution that stands up to any comparison
Finally, there is the personal relationship that builds during the solutioning, contracting and implementation phase that continues during the ongoing operational phase and is critical to those last minute requests on a Friday afternoon.
Not all that glitters is gold, speak to us (office@l3c.cloud or 0203 542 0870) for your AIX cloud and Unix cloud needs and challenge us to meet your business, technical and commercial needs.
