Removing Risk and Downtime from Your POWER9 Migration
IBM’s POWER9 processor is here, and many companies are excited to take full advantage of the significant leap in performance, scalability, and adaptability offered by a new generation of IBM Power Systems machines that run POWER9. But for system administrators, there usually isn’t much excitement when facing the job of migrating all of the necessary data, applications, and system configurations to the new hardware. That’s because downtime and complications often accompany a migration, especially when backup tapes are the chosen medium.
A recent Syncsort survey of nearly 200 IT professionals who manage IBM Power Systems is rather telling in this regard. Survey results show that 60% of respondents have delayed a migration for various reasons, with the largest being concerns about downtime. In addition, 31% say they have experienced a migration failure.
Administrators know that migration using backup tapes creates a large and uncertain downtime window, and uncertainty always equates to stress. Some of the questions that keep administrators up at night include:
- What happens if one of the backup tapes is bad?
- What if it takes longer than planned to test everything on the new machine before cutover?
- What if there is a critical issue with a key application on the new system?
- Can we quickly and successfully roll back to the old machine if something causes the migration to go south?
Fortunately, replication technology provides an alternative to backup tapes and significantly reduces the downtime and anxiety of migrations. Replication allows you to copy all essential objects from your environment(s) on your old machine to the new machine without interfering with normal day-to-day business operations. All subsequent activity on the old machine is then continuously replicated in real time to the new machine, and all testing on the new machine can be done at your leisure, again without interrupting business processes. Best of all, when you are ready to execute the final cutover, the required downtime is usually mere minutes. Compare this to the hours or even days of downtime that occur with tape-based migrations.
Regardless of whether you use backup tapes or replication technology as the medium, every migration requires proper planning and testing to be successful. To help you plan your migration to POWER9, Syncsort has created a new e-book called Four Essential Steps for Removing Risk and Downtime from Your POWER9 Migration. The four steps covered in this e-book are:
- Assess Project Scope and Prepare for Migration
- Select Your Migration Method
- Create and Execute Your Migration Plan
- Test the Migration
Click here to download this e-book that contains many useful insights that will help you with your POWER9 migration.
This valuable e-book also describes Syncsort’s Migrate While Active offering, which couples its best-in-class replication technology with an IBM i migration expert who implements and manages the replication technology while guiding you and your team through every step of the migration planning, execution, and testing processes. Already have a Syncsort high availability product? If so, you can use this as the replication engine for your migration and contract for the services portion of Migrate While Active to have one of our migration experts work side by side with you through the entire process. Click here[BR2] to learn more about Migrate While Active.
Syncsort experts have migrated hundreds of companies and thousands of IBM i environments to new IBM Power Systems hardware. They know how to find and resolve any “gotcha” that could occur before it ever creates a showstopper during the migration. Just think of the peace of mind this can bring to you, your colleagues, and your management.