IBM i Global

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  • 1.  IBM i Migration (Re-Hosting)

    Posted Sun May 15, 2022 09:30 AM
    Hi,

    Good Day. Now a days, we are hearing options like Migration/Modernization/Re-Hosting from IBM i to Linux using 5250 emulator or their compilers s/w. I am sure many of you would have explored it. Any guidance on these vendors migrations claim capabilities. Infinite i offers re hosting IBM i to Linux  and various other vendors too offer migration off from IBM i. Can you share pros and cons of these vendors/approach and performance/experience aspect once Customer move to other platforms from IBM i.

    With Regards
    Angela B

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    Angela B
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  • 2.  RE: IBM i Migration (Re-Hosting)

    Posted Sun May 15, 2022 11:17 AM

    First of all, I do not think, that "re-platforming" of an existing app delivers any business value, and I'm no expert in that field and don't know the existing "solutions" for this use case. 

    But years ago (in the early 1990s) I found myself thrown a BABY/36 solution with an existing /36 application on me (it was during an acquisition), and it wasn't a so great experience. OK back then, the hardware was a real cost factor, and the 386 in use to replace the small /36 was really cheap related to the /36. But there were tons of incompatibilities - hundreds of work arounds - and some hardware dongle that made more problems, than it was worth. 

    So we decided, to re-platform the BABY/36 application to the STRS36 subsystem on our AS/400 and connected the users via remote connection. You could say it was the "poor man's private cloud" of the 1990s - and it worked great, from day 1. Users were happy, only some
    leased line cost and much better security and safety on our central machine. 

    Today, if one of my customers asks about something like that, I always would recommend the "real thing" - if they don't want the hardware, just rent a partition at PowerBunker or somewhere - the re-platforming isn't worth the cost. 

    Just my 2ct about that. 

    Regards,



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    Daniel Gross
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  • 3.  RE: IBM i Migration (Re-Hosting)

    Posted Sun May 15, 2022 11:27 AM
    Thanks for sharing your Point of View.

    Regards

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    Angela B
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  • 4.  RE: IBM i Migration (Re-Hosting)

    IBM Champion
    Posted Mon May 16, 2022 04:20 AM
    Edited by Satid Singkorapoom Mon May 16, 2022 05:54 AM
    Dear Angela

    In the past 15 years or so, I knew (and was involved in a few cases) a number of IBM i customers (in ASEAN geography) that moved away to UNIX/Windows or non-IBM i Cloud platforms and the main drive was a desire for IT operating cost reduction and the results were degraded application performance. The users were not happy with the result BUT these customers were of the type whose IT organization was not beholden to its user organization and therefore did not suffer from users' complaint about degraded application performance as long as it was not severely so to the point of disruption of business operations.

    I also knew a few IBM i customers of the type that user organization was dominant for their high management team that also tried platform change but failed miserably in the Proof of Concept phase due to degraded application performance issue on the new platform.  

    All these cases involved "multi-platform" type of application (such as the old SAP ECC, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, Infor M3 and other Java-based apps).  My observation from several of these cases is that UNIX/Windows platform needed more HW resources (CPU, memory, disk) than a "well-tuned" IBM i server to provide similar level of application performance and therefore the operating cost reduction goal was not achieved.  The "well-tuned" part is from my involvement providing support as IBM i performance expert.    

    What I can tell you is that if your core business application runs a lot of SQL and/or Queries (OPNQRYF, Query Definitions) like the app names I mentioned above, you need an IBM i performance expert (most likely from IBM Lab Services team) to deliver application performance optimization with useful index creation to be well-tumed and this can be done relatively more efficiently on IBM i than on other platforms because DB2 for i has many more efficient tools available for this purpose.  I delivered this kind of optimization to about 40 customers or so in the past 15 years in ASEAN with satisfactory results.  The largest case was a 20-core POWER7 server running SAP ECC serving about 1,500 users.  

    For applications with not much SQL or Queries workload, performance analysis (especially on the part of Wait Time analysis) is key to overall application performance improvement.

    For the offering you are proposed, it would be prudent of you to ask for a PoC test to see the result.  And if you have application performance concern in a particular part of your core workload (such as nightly batch run), be sure to test its performance in the PoC as well.


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    Satid Singkorapoom
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  • 5.  RE: IBM i Migration (Re-Hosting)

    Posted Mon May 16, 2022 09:33 AM
    Hi Angela, I strongly encourage you to read the following two posts from Steve Will and Brandon Pederson :

    https://community.ibm.com/community/user/power/blogs/steven-will1/2021/02/26/you-and-i-ibm-i-and-cloud

    https://community.ibm.com/community/user/power/blogs/brandon-pederson1/2020/12/06/the-business-impact-of-modernizing-your-ibm-i-plat

    This will strengthen what Daniel already replied to you.

    Have a good day!

    Fabian

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    Fabian Michel
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