While the ability to virtualize and move AIX workloads has been available in-house, or as a hosted service, for several decades, AIX as a Cloud offering is still in the early phases of inception. Today we explore some of the reasons behind the slower uptake of the AIX workload in a cloud environment.
As the IT industry moves toward open-source solutions such as Linux, applications being hosted on AIX are declining. However, production AIX workloads are vital, business-critical applications and are tightly intertwined with other production workloads, making them essential to business operations where they exist. High-speed communication with significant bandwidth is a crucial requirement for AIX workloads, typically rendering them a poor candidate for cloud services. So why is there a market for AIX cloud now? Those critical AIX production workloads are not going away any time soon and need to be maintained with Development Test environments which are ideal for cloud computing.
AIX Dev / Test Workloads in the Cloud
Services, such as Data Integrity’s AIX Cloud, present an opportunity to move non-mission-critical portions of the workload (such as development and testing) to the cloud, reducing costs while providing a suitable working environment. Although development and testing workloads are not mission critical, AIX workloads are unique in nature and customization of the environments is usually necessary. Through a tightly managed onboarding process, unique functionality of the specific environment are taken into considering, including:
- Providing a secure environment
- Provisioning cores, memory and tier 2 storage volumes
- Modification of cores, memory and storage volumes upon request
- Provisioning the Operating System image
- Patching the service provider supplied O/S image
- Network provisioning (VPN or otherwise)
- Nightly backups of the environment
- Support for designated customer contacts
- Resource monitoring
- 24/7 first-level support
- Decommissioning of resources
How Does AIX in the Cloud Differ From Typical Public Cloud Offerings?
- Built-in Environment Recovery
Based upon the complex environment, we deemed it necessary to provide complimentary onsite backup of the environment to provide faster recovery in case of a lost or damaged partition. These backups are done nightly, and a three-day rotation is kept. Note: This is to provide partition recovery not data recovery.
- Managed-service Provisioning
While we strive to provide self-provisioning to our customers, the current IBM tools, while function-rich, are not Public-Cloud-ready. In order maintain confidentiality and security, all provisioning requests are performed by Data Integrity personnel, via existing portals, with an expected standard request (adds, deletes, modifications) turn-around time of 2 hours during normal business hours.
- Network Usage
Current Cloud customers may have encountered network data charges when off-loading data from their Cloud service. In AIX Cloud, however, the cost is included in the base offering and there are no additional data charges.
- Security
If customers choose to use and maintain their own images, root access is not required. However, for maintenance and recovery purposes, Data Integrity must have knowledge of the root ID and password for their supplied AIX image to use it. We will notify the designated customer contact in advance if access is required.
Customers may also choose to take advantage of our storage encryption and proof-of-removal services offered during the on-boarding process.
While we continue to work closely with IBM to close existing gaps with some of the tools, the managed-service provisioning makes this solution viable for customers. AIX Cloud is currently available for non-critical workloads.
Read more about the state of Cloud technology in the IDC AIX Cloud report
Excerpt: "CIOs continue to face significant challenges surrounding the technologies that they are unable to shift to the cloud, particularly core production technologies such as AIX. Critical to the operation of the business, these technologies represent an increasingly larger portion of the on-premise "run" budget, particularly as cloud drives down the cost of other technologies."
