At Meridian IT, we’ve been providing a range of public and private cloud and managed services for the IBM Power platform for more than a decade now. But over the past two years, we’ve made a fundamental change in the way we advise our clients about their infrastructure choices
When people first started using the term “hybrid cloud”, they thought of it as a stepping-stone. There was an acknowledgement that organisations couldn’t lift-and-shift everything into the cloud at once, so they would need to go through a transition period where on-premises and cloud systems would need to coexist. Hybrid cloud was meant to bridge that gap as a temporary measure.
Now? Sometime? Or never?
As the market has matured, we’ve realised that the original idea of hybrid cloud as a temporary transitional phase doesn’t match the reality of our clients’ experiences.The truth is that some systems, particularly legacy applications, aren’t a good fit for cloud—and they won’t ever be. It’s best to keep them on-premises until they can finally be replaced and retired. And this means that, at least for the foreseeable future, hybrid architectures are here to stay.
Most businesses also rely on a range of more modern core applications, such as ERP and CRM systems. These are much better candidates for migrating to a cloud platform—but the public cloud may not be the best option. A private cloud environment that offers enterprise-class monitoring, 24/7 support, and state-of-the-art data replication, failover, backup, and disaster recovery services can often be the right choice here.
And then there are your non-production systems. Your developers and testers don’t work 24 hours a day, so why should you pay for development and test environments to be available 24/7? They’re an ideal candidate to move into the public cloud because you don’t need the same level of resilience, and you can make significant savings by automatically turning them off when they’re not being used.
Hybrid is the New Normal
The key insight, then, is that hybrid cloud isn’t going to be a stopgap, it’s going to be a permanent state of affairs. You will always have systems that are best suited to particular types of infrastructure, and true efficiency is finding a manageable way to run each workload where it runs best. That’s where partnering with Meridian IT can offer a unique advantage, especially for companies that rely on the IBM Power platform to run business-critical applications.
We’re currently perhaps the only company worldwide with a proven track record of migrating IBM i workloads not only into the IBM Cloud, but also into Microsoft Azure via our partnership with Skytap—so we have the public cloud covered.
Then we have the Meridian Power Cloud, one of the largest private cloud installations of IBM Power servers in the world. More than 400 customers already trust our Power Cloud to run their core IBM i and AIX applications, because what we offer goes way beyond just the hardware. Our 24/7 monitoring, backup-as-a-service, and security solutions add the extra layers of resilience that clients need for their business-critical systems. These solutions are tailored for each client.
And finally, for those legacy applications that just aren’t a good fit for the cloud, we’ve come up with a novel solution. With our Flex Capacity Managed Service, we’ll install and manage enterprise class servers at your site, and we’ll only charge you for the capacity you use. So you get all the flexibility and elasticity benefits of a cloud solution, combined with our remote management, support, and backup services, in your own data centre.
Making Hybrid Achievable
If you can’t migrate the application your options are limited and the temptation is move platforms. That’s where Meridian IT’s other USP makes a difference. With our own Software Development Team and PMO we can combine application modernisation and migration services to make cloud optimisation a reality. That just leaves the management of an environment that can be dynamic.
Making Hybrid Manageable
Crucially, we can give you the same level of service for all your systems, regardless of which applications are running on-premise and which are in the private or public cloud. We abstract away all the complexities of managing a hybrid landscape, so you can focus on getting the most out of your applications without worrying about availability, capacity, performance, or data protection.
You can learn more about Meridian IT’s managed services for IBM Power by reading our new brochure, “Harness the Power of Partnership”– or reach out to us today at [email protected]
