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Tag: skytap

  • Skytap Announces Upcoming General Availability of First Self-Service, Public Cloud Capabilities for IBM i

    Skytap Cloud support for IBM i and integration with IBM PowerHA will deliver a comprehensive public cloud solution for AIX, IBM i, and Linux applications running on IBM Power Systems

    SEATTLE – February 11, 2019 – Ahead of IBM Think, Skytap, a global, purpose-built public cloud provider, today announced that its support for the IBM i operating systemwill be generally available in Q2 2019, followed by support for IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX Enterprise Edition, which will become available in the second half of 2019. These new capabilities broaden Skytap’s unique value for migrating and running IBM i and AIX applications in the cloud with high availability.

    Skytap is focused on making it easy to build, run, and evolve traditional applications by rapidly migrating them to the cloud, enabling modern development practices, and integrating new cloud architectures. To accelerate enterprise migration and adoption of IBM i applications in the public cloud, Skytap has joined with Rocket Software, HelpSystems, and SyncSort. Together, Skytap and its partners deliver a strong ecosystem of technology, service, and implementation capabilities to drive successful adoption initiatives via Skytap’s public cloud offering.

    “Enterprises are currently operating application portfolios that could benefit from cloud migration but are ill-suited for hyperscale clouds. These portfolios often include large IBM Power Systems installations and present a complex challenge that major providers can’t solve,” said Karri Alexion-Tiernan, SVP of Product Marketing & Digital, Skytap. “Our priority is to help customers and partners address these challenges by charting a better path forward. These added capabilities continue to distinguish Skytap as the preferred public cloud for IBM i applications.”

    Skytap Cloud Offers Comprehensive Support for IBM Power Systems

    Skytap Cloud is purpose-built to accelerate the cloud migration of applications that run on a variety of operating systems, including AIX, IBM i, and Linux on Power Systems. Skytap’s IBM i support will be delivered with a diverse group of best-in-breed partners, providing end-to-end support for enterprises who are defining their modernization journey for IBM i and AIX-based applications in the cloud.

    Rocket Software is actively testing products in Skytap’s IBM i preview program, including its Rocket Aldon application lifecycle management (ALM) and DevOps solution suite. The combination of Skytap Cloud self-service environments and Rocket Aldon will deliver a comprehensive, on-demand solution for faster innovation and automation of IBM i application deployments.

    “Until we started working with Skytap, we did not have a public cloud option for our IBM Power Systems customers. We’re excited to join with Skytap to pioneer a path to cloud for IBM i and AIX, which will unlock significant value for customer applications that previously had no access to public cloud services,” said Daniel Magid VP, Solution Sales, Rocket Software.

    The First Public Cloud Offering of PowerHA for AIX

    Since announcing support for AIX on Power Systems in 2017, it has become clear there is demand for a cloud-based high availability and disaster recovery solution for AIX. With the inclusion of IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX Enterprise Edition, Skytap will add support for these use cases from on-premises to Skytap Cloud and region-to-region within Skytap Cloud.

    “The ability to run PowerHA for AIX in Skytap Cloud shows a continued commitment to IBM Power Systems and addresses the needs of these critical AIX applications,” said Steven Finnes, IBM PowerHA Product Offering Manager. “Enterprises that have invested in AIX over the years are now looking for a path to the public cloud and Skytap Cloud provides a path forward.”

    Skytap Real-World Impact on Display at IBM Think

    Skytap is a Gold IBM Business Partner and will be demonstrating its new capabilities at IBM Think, Feb. 12-15, in San Francisco. Skytap will once again be powering multiple IBM Learning environments at IBM Think, supporting more than 3,000 hands-on labs including IBM Cloud Private, IBM Cloud Private for Data, PowerSC, and more for thousands of users, totaling 10,000 virtual machines and over 725 Terabytes of storage.

    “Skytap enables us to reliably scale our hands-on technical training for an event this size. We can create identical environment replicas hundreds of times with a click of a button, enabling us to offer real-time learning across our broad portfolio of technologies. It’s a win for both IBM and our customers,” said Erik D. Anderson, IBM Principal Architect, Digital Technical Engagement.

    In addition, notable companies will be presenting the value that Skytap Cloud has brought to their organizations and its capabilities for accelerating the migration and modernization of many applications, including:

    Skytap Powers Multi-Cloud Success with New Terraform Provider

    Multi-cloud adoption continues to accelerate as enterprise organizations adopt different cloud services best suited for specific workloads, and to avoid lock-in. Gartner predicts, “By 2021, over 75% of midsize and large organizations will have adopted a multicloud and/or hybrid IT strategy.”[1] Building on its ability to integrate with other cloud-native services through APIs, Skytap has released an open source provider for Hashicorp Terraform. Customers can now use Terraform to manage Skytap Cloud for traditional application workloads, including IBM Power Systems, alongside hyperscale clouds for cloud-native applications.

    Availability

    Skytap’s support for IBM i will be generally available in Q2, 2019. Support for IBM PowerHA SystemMirror for AIX Enterprise will follow in H2, 2019. Skytap’s Terraform provider is available today as open source code on Github along with documentation.

    Learn More

    About Skytap

    Skytap is a global public cloud purpose-built for modernizing traditional applications. Skytap Cloud makes it easy to build, run, and evolve these hybrid applications by rapidly migrating traditional workloads to the cloud, enabling modern development practices, and integrating new cloud architectures. We power multi- and hybrid-cloud strategies through secure connections to other clouds and on-premises data centers. Our environments technology accelerates application development, simplifies management, and reduces IT costs, enabling hundreds of customers worldwide to modernize at the pace of their business. www.skytap.com

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    [1] “Predicts 2019: Increasing Reliance on Cloud Computing Tranforms IT and Business Practices,” Gartner, December 2018

  • Skytap Simplifies Application Modernization with New Container Management Solution

    SEATTLE – April 10, 2017 – Skytap, Inc., the enterprise cloud, today launched Skytap Container Management, which accelerates application modernization by enabling IT organizations to develop, deploy, and run traditional enterprise and containerized applications together in Skytap’s Cloud. Skytap Container Management combines the power of cloud and containers to modernize enterprise applications frequently confined in on-premises data centers. This new solution delivers full visibility across environments, improving collaboration between development and operations to accelerate software delivery.

    Application modernization is critical to success in today’s digital economy. This transformation requires enterprises to evolve IT infrastructure, processes, and architecture. Organizations in every industry need to replace legacy hardware with cloud resources, implement agile and DevOps processes, and adopt new application architectures, including containers. Executing this transition enables faster, safer, and more efficient software delivery, which is the cornerstone of on-demand digital services that customers expect. Skytap Container Management equips enterprises with a single application modernization solution that takes core business applications trapped in data centers to containers in the cloud.

    News Highlights

    Skytap Container Management enables customers to build, deploy, run, and manage traditional enterprise and containerized applications side-by-side in blended cloud environments. These capabilities broaden Skytap’s support for containerized applications, building on theSkytap Driver for Docker Machine. Skytap Container Management supports a range of container platform and orchestration technologies, including Docker and Kubernetes, allowing customers to use their container technology of choice in the Skytap Cloud. Benefits include:

    • Unified Management: Skytap Container Management gives development and operations teams complete visibility and control over container workloads. Users can leverage Skytap’s self-service, blended environments to clone, suspend, resume, and share these mixed environments in seconds. This unified approach to managing traditional enterprise and containerized applications provides full transparency from initial build through to production deployments.
    • Heterogeneous Integration: Skytap’s open approach to containers gives customers complete freedom to change and evolve IT architectural strategy over time. Skytap Container Management integrates with everything from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes, allowing customers to choose their preferred container tooling and avoid vendor lock-in.
    • Full control over containers: Skytap’s easily configurable container hosts allow IT teams to ensure environments throughout the software development lifecycle match the same OS, patch level, virtual hardware settings (CPUs, RAM, disk), and container runtime versions that run in production.

    Supporting Quotes

    “Much like the enterprise shift to the cloud, container adoption is also accelerating. However, there remain significant barriers to both these transitions. The fact is the majority of core business applications were not developed for cloud infrastructure or architected for containers. Skytap Container Management solves these challenges by making it easy to lift enterprise applications into the cloud, modernize these applications with container technology, and then manage both traditional and containerized applications side-by-side.”

    — Brad Schick, CTO, Skytap

     Learn More

    Skytap is running a live webinar at 9:00 am PT on April 12, entitled, “Spring into Containers: Bring New Life to your Old Apps”. The webinar will demonstrate the new Skytap Container Management solution and its capabilities for migrating enterprise applications to the cloud and then modernizing them with container technology. Register.

    Skytap is hosting, “Docker, DevOps, and Reality: A Panel Discussion” at 5:30 pm on Wednesday, April 19, at DockerCon in Austin, TX. The panel will explore the challenges, benefits, and best practices for running containers in production. Skytap’s director of DevOps consulting, Kelly Looney, will moderate the panel featuring Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO, Puppet, Lin Sin, Senior Software Engineer, IBM Cloud, John Morello, CTO, Twistlock, and Dan Jones, Director of Product Management, Skytap. The panel takes place at Max’s Wine Dive, 207 San Jacinto Boulevard in Austin, just a short walk from the Convention Center. Register.

    About Skytap

    Skytap is a premier cloud provider designed specifically for enterprise applications. We eliminate the barriers to cloud adoption for these applications that every business depends on, enabling enterprises to modernize these applications at their own pace. Skytap’s cloud delivers faster development, simplified management, and reduced costs. Our patented technology replicates data center environments all the way to the networking layer, enabling hundreds of customers worldwide to easily and securely shift complex systems to the cloud, including Windows, Linux, and AIX-based components. Learn how Skytap can help accelerate your digital transformation atwww.skytap.com.

    — Jules Louis

  • Why are we still asking, “Can DevOps work here?”

    Why are we still asking, “Can DevOps work here?”

    It’s easy to get tired of buzzwords, especially in the software development and testing world where they’re so prevalent. But while it’s easy to blame the thought leaders and evangelists for creating them, and publishers and powerful marketing teams for inserting them into every content channel imaginable, the buzzwords that truly stick around do so on their own merit.

    Agile, big data, and cloud have been written about and philosophized for years—and I hate to break it to you, but they’re not going anywhere. While they may not be the panacea that some make them out to be, their impact on the way we develop, test, deploy, and release software has been documented in every market and industry around the globe. This gives the words their staying power. Not relentless press coverage that’s been covertly sponsored by marketing and PR dollars.

    Members of the academy and esteemed buzzwords in the software hall of fame: join me in welcoming our newest member: DevOps.

    You may say it’s too early, and that DevOps hasn’t been around long enough to earn such universal acceptance. Many quickly cite John Allspaw and Paul Hammond’s 2009 presentation, “10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr” as the real inspiration behind Patrick Debois’ coining of the term, and if you’ve never viewed the session, I can’t recommend it enough.

    Skip ahead to today and we’ve got multiple conferences that focus on DevOps exclusively. Devops Days, DevOps Summit, DevOps Connect and DevOps Enterprise feature some the most respected speakers and writers alive today.

    But they’re not the only ones speaking there. CTOs, CIOs, chief architects, IT heads, and QA directors from every bank, retailer, hospitality group, government agency, and software development shop are there, too, and with a captivatingly similar story behind their employer’s decision to “do” DevOps.

    They were stuck. Their software was late. It didn’t address their customers’ real needs, and it didn’t address their own company’s needs. Their application stacks were growing increasingly complex, the bottlenecks in their SDLC were increasing, and their ability to innovate, accelerate, and stay ahead of their competition was slipping further away from them.

    What I find especially interesting in re-watching many of these conference sessions is that a lot of them were also leveraging the other buzzwords mentioned above. They’d been practicing agile for years, and they’d started to look to the cloud to lighten their hardware dependence and provisioning headaches.

    What they all needed, and thankfully found, was a disruptor. And no matter what definition you attribute to DevOps (and good grief, there are so many) there’s no denying its disruptive nature.

    It disrupts the culture of your dev, QA, and ops teams. It requires constant communication, more deploys, earlier testing, shifting left, an embracing of “failing fast and failing often” and what’s often described as “relentless automation.” Some would even argue that the hardest part of DevOps is getting executive buy-in and sponsorship so that you can even begin your initiative. Though to be fair, your ground level troops should be just as on-board as your commanding officers in order to have the best chance for success.

    Joachim Bauernberger at InfoQ recently looked into whether DevOps can work in Telecoms, and it turns out, like in any industry looking to resolve the constraints and bottlenecks listed above, it most certainly can—however, it requires support and commitment from “all links in the delivery chain.”

    And this is the only reason you should be asking, “Can DevOps work here?” Do you have the right people, and are you the right person to increase the likelihood of this disruptive shift within your company? Stop wondering if (or worse, doubting) your industry will support DevOps, because each year and each conference that passes proves that it can.

    And soon enough, if the people at your organization are exposed as the real constraints and bottlenecks, they’ll be removed. Don’t be one of them. Be disruptive.

     

    About the Author/Noel Wurst

    noel wurst

    Noel Wurst, Managing Editor at Skytap, Noel is responsible for setting and executing Skytap’s content marketing strategy. That includes overseeing the creation and distribution of high-quality, targeted content, and managing the team and external resources associated with those efforts. By leveraging deep online marketing, project management, and editorial experience, Noel plays a crucial role in helping generate and nurture leads with compelling content. You can follow Noel and Skytap at @NoelWurst and LinkedIn and @Skytap, Skytap’s LinkedIn 

  • DevOps: Where are we with that?

    DevOps: Where are we with that?

    There’s a great scene in the Kids in the Hall movie Brain Candy, where the CEO of a major pharmaceutical company informs his executive team that the board has recommended a massive restructuring plan that will cut their research outlay by 60%. Only seconds after first mentioning this undertaking, the CEO turns to his yes man, Marv, and asks:

    “Where are we with that?”

    Marv responds: “The thing you just mentioned just now?”

    And after getting an affirmative response, Marv foolishly, yet not surprisingly answers:

    “Oh, we’re on top of that, Don.”

    It’s not hard to imagine this same scene playing out in real life where the restructuring being recommended is that found in DevOps. Marv and his fellow executives have agreed to a restructuring plan that’s going to dramatically affect the flow of work and the lives of many people at their company, but without having any real idea of why this plan is needed, how much it will cost, or even where to begin. They’ve just been asked to reduce the cost of their product by 60%, and to begin, well, five seconds ago.

    Sound familiar?

    There was a time when DevOps was possibly an even bigger buzzword than it is today, but that doesn’t mean it has gone anywhere, or lost popularity. In fact, its adoption has only increased since the term was coined, and it can be found everywhere from the smallest shops—all the way to massive enterprises.

    So why is it still so hard to successfully pitch DevOps to executive leaders?

    We’ve written before that the ambiguity around DevOps’ definition is one of the primary causes of the confusion surrounding the term, and the debate between whether it’s a “mindset” “practice” or “cultural shift” will likely never die (just don’t let anyone tell you it’s a “tool”).

    Rather than argue the buzzword’s definition, many at last year’s DevOps Enterprise Summit argued that the best way to promote a DevOps initiative at your organization, especially to your executive leaders, is to not call it DevOps at all.

    Since I’ve always liked the term DevOps, it’s taken me a while to come around to this concept, but I think those esteemed speakers are on to something.

    Vendors, analysts, the media, and other stakeholders have all had enough time to develop their own personal assumptions around DevOps. Maybe it was first proposed to them by an overblown consultant, or it was part of the failed vision of a former executive who is now on the outs. All it takes is one negative DevOps word association within your leadership and your noble pursuit of its buy-in could be quickly derailed.

    So if you don’t call it DevOps, what do you call it? “Lean IT?” “Agile Innovation Processes?” “Continuous Flow Delivery?” “ Industrialized Software Development?”

    It’ll take you more words, but I’d recommend using DevOps’ results, and not any perceived buzzworthiness of the term alone, as its primary selling point. While “more words” means “more time”—something your e-staff likely has very little of—you’ll both get and hold their attention much quicker than just saying “DevOps” and expecting the applause and champagne to start flowing.

    Gene Kim’s definition of DevOps supports this concept, and in a recent interview he remarked:

    I would define DevOps by the outcomes. In my mind, DevOps is those set of cultural norms and technology practices that enable the fast flow of planned work from, among others, development, through tests into operations while preserving world class reliability, operation and security. DevOps is not about what you do, but what your outcomes are.

    For those who are somehow just learning about DevOps, or for those who have known of its existence for years now, but who have been hesitant to pitch it to their own leadership, the good news is that the outcomes of DevOps are being proven not just at big names like Disney, GE, and Netflix—they’re even being felt by those who’ve implemented it at non-Dev or Ops fields like Security, and even Design.

    Your VPs of App Dev and QA will likely be impressed by your mention of accelerated feedback loops and reduced defects. Your IT Operations leadership, no matter what distrust they harbor for app dev, would have a hard time arguing against increased visibility into the delivery pipeline, and better quality when the software lands in production. Then when the CEO hears about faster service delivery and improved time to market, you may as well start sketching out your plans for that corner office.

    (Editors note: Author’s promise of a corner office is his own, and is not guaranteed by Skytap)

    About the Author/Noel Wurst

    noel wurst

    Noel Wurst, Managing Editor at Skytap, Noel is responsible for setting and executing Skytap’s content marketing strategy. That includes overseeing the creation and distribution of high-quality, targeted content, and managing the team and external resources associated with those efforts. By leveraging deep online marketing, project management, and editorial experience, Noel plays a crucial role in helping generate and nurture leads with compelling content. You can follow Noel and Skytap at @NoelWurst and LinkedIn and @Skytap, Skytap’s LinkedInÂ