Skytap on Azure

Please submit a form or email us with more details about your environment and a contact number so we can discuss with you directly. You won’t be called by a sales person, it will just be to verify the technical environment and commercial constraints. We can provide the price for the Skytap infrastructure, backup environment including storage in Azure blob, monitoring environment and network charges. We will also provide you a fixed price per LPAR for the L3C migration services.

Besides the actual costs of the LPAR resources in Skytap, we also help you size any costs related to Azure Native. These might include:

• Intel-based instances
• Azure Monitor charges (very few)
• Azure Blob charges for backup
• Network charges for interconnectivity - Azure VPN / ExpressRoute Gateway, Azure Route Server, etc.

By default dynamic VPN connectivity is included in the service for usage. We also offer:

1. Site-to-site VPN connectivity
2. Dedicated ExpressRoute and Private Network Connection to Azure/Skytap
3. Secure public access if required

As part of our engagement we will provide general guidance from our depth of experience migrating UK, European and US clients.  We also provide a service that will include testing bandwith and latency accross different services in Skytap and Azure Native, helping you choose the optimal one for you. This will include setting up S2S tunnels, VNET2VNET connections, ExpressRoute, etc. Latency is tested in both sides and output documentation is provided.

We help design the environment with a high available physical nodes design. Also options are provided for configuration and support of PowerHA/HACMP implementations.

The Skytap infrastructure charges are billed through your Azure subscription. You can choose PAYG pricing or 1 year or 3 year reserved capacity to optimise costs.  L3C provides a fixed price per LPAR for the design and build of the Skytap environment and the migration of the workloads giving you certainty over project costs. For our managed services these can be on a month by month basis or committed term based on your needs. For committed term agreements we do not charge annual price increases further enhancing budget predictability.

You can find the supported OS versions on the relevant Skytap page by clicking here.

Older versions of AIX can be supported under a WPAR.

This depends on the amount of data to be transferred and communications links available. L3C will advise you and design the most appropriate method according to your needs. We can utilise existing tooling you may have such as Oracle Dataguard or IBM i replication software (such as Mimix, QuickEDD etc) as well as native operating system commands such as msksysb, rsync or BRMS functionality etc. We can utilise secure S2S VPN connectivity as well as Azure Expressroute connections. Essentially we will create the migration approach based on your allowable downtime, communication mechanisms and amount of data to be transferred.

Yes we can set up a proof of concept or sandbox environment for you to test functionality within Skytap but also migration approach(es). Please contact us using the form or email us directly at office@l3c.cloud to discuss further.

Skytap on Azure is available in multiple data centres worldwide. UK data sovereignty can also be maintained by having primary and secondary locations within the UK. At L3C we will design the landing zones based on your data and DR requirements.

Yes, Skytap on Azure can provide primary and secondary locations within the UK on request. L3C can help with the provisioning of this.

The Skytap infrastructure is housed within Microsoft Azure Data Centres worldwide. More details on the security and compliance posture can be found by downloading the Skytap on Azure Security and Compliance paper here.

At L3C we are Cyber Essentials compliant as well as possessing the following ISO Certifications, ISO27001 (Information Security Management), ISO 20000-1 (IT Service Management) and ISO9001 (Quality Management).

We will implement a backup and retention policy based on your requirements. Typically we utilise Commvault as the backup mechanism but we can also implement native operating system tooling such as BRMS (for IBM i). If you currently utilise other backup products then we can discuss the most appropriate approach with you. This often depends on whether you will continue to support the environment yourself post migration (and therefore prefer to use an existing tool) or whether you require a cloud managed service and therefore the tooling is less of a concern. We will integrate the backup into Azure blob storage to reduce backup storage costs and allow tiering of backup data.

You can utilise your existing system monitoring tooling for the AIX and IBM i environments. L3C have also developed a unique tool which integrates AIX and IBM i system monitoring into the Azure Monitor dashboard giving you a single view of your whole Azure native and Skytap environment

We have migrated many AIX/Oracle environments to Skytap on Azure. Oracle RAC workloads are supported in Skytap through the Multi-Attach Storage feature in Skytap which we have tested and implemented for clients.