back to article AIX-on-Power-as-a-service is a thing? Yup, a cloud just went there

The cloud's great for x86 CPUs, Windows and Linux. Other architectures? Not so much. IBM has a Power-powered cloud, but delivered it almost a year late. We've also spotted the occasional ARM-powered clouds and know of niche hosting companies that will put anything in a cloud-like environment, even anAS/400 tricked out to Tweet …

  1. Pirate Dave Silver badge

    I admit it's been decades since I looked at the mini space, but isn't the Prime Directive in IBM-land that "Everything down to the last bit of memory has to be licensed and authorized by IBM" ?

    And I thought another reason folks went for S/36's and AS/400's was because they would continue running through anything less that a direct nuclear detonation overhead. Why would the folks who are used to, and relying on, that want to trust "the Cloud" for their critical stuffs? (especially in light of the recent Amazon pooch-screwing with AWS)

    Just curious, really, about whether this has legs or not. I'm not trying to poop on Skytap.

  2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    IT Angle

    Internally an iSeries (AS400) also runs on POWER architecture.

    But all languages compile down to the "Machine Interface" level with is like an object aware assembler which shields you from the underlying actual hardware.

    I think the most frequently useful thing about PHB's pushing for "The Cloud" is it gets IT to look at what the real costs of hardware, software, training and support are.

    For some it will work out cheaper (provided the legal implications, which are huge, are worked out).

    For others, not so much.

  3. Androgynous Cow Herd

    Inertia as a service

    Yes, we know you REALLY want to migrate off our proprietary platform rather than subscribe to it.

  4. Anonymous Crowbar

    Before I left the Unix, and primarily AIX, world behind a few months ago I had been playing around with PowerVC. It was basically Openstack implementation with AIX/Power systems, and included interfaces for the v7000 SANs and Flash840 untis we had.

    Spinning up images and so forth was pretty easy, once you had a recorded good state. It was kind of like on premises-cloudy stuff.

    I would have thought that they would have just expanded on that?

  5. Gideon_Pelser

    AIX-on-Power-as-a-service is a thing?

    I partly own a company in South Africa which also provides AIX/Linux/IBM I on POWER in the Cloud as well as Windows/Linux on X86 servers. It has always been a huge gap in the market, as the servers are too expensive to purchase and house, so the value you get from running in the Cloud was watered down. We have had to negotiate with IBM for over a year to get a licensing model that would be suitable for everyone, and also provide a usage based model. I am happy to see that this seems to be a direction that other MSP providers are also looking into.

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