Your box runs your business, but if your business runs IBM i on aging Power9 or older, you may be facing some new challenges. Your IBM i environment may be behind the scenes, but the applications running on it could be central to nearly every transaction your business completes. If that environment becomes unavailable, how long can your operation continue before the interruption affects customers, cash flow, or production? Is Hope Your Strategy for Keeping Your Business Running? With IBM Power8 at end-of-life and IBM Power9 at end-of-service, many business owners running IBM i on Power9 or older are living in a state of perpetual hope. They hope the system won’t go down. They hope they can find the parts they need if it does. They hope they can find and afford to hire someone who understands the system well enough to maintain it. They hope they don’t need a backup. They hope the backup doesn’t go out at the same time… When your business relies on your technology, hope is not a sustainable strategy. You need a documented plan for keeping critical workloads available and recovering them within an acceptable timeframe. Without that plan, an extended outage could disrupt operations, delay revenue, and damage customer relationships. Why Do You Need a Disaster Recovery Plan for Your IBM i Environment?  What’s the longest your business can continue if your tech goes down? Have you sat down and calculated exactly how long before things are past the point of recovery? According to the The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, 69% of small businesses have no disaster plan. With an older system you’re maintaining yourself, it becomes harder and harder to fix things once they go wrong. Now, you may be tempted to think something like, “Well, I haven’t had a problem with it for three years, so it will be fine!” Maybe… but would you say the same thing about your car? No hardware lasts indefinitely, and the operational consequences of failure generally increase as equipment and expertise become harder to replace. If you’re not prepared, you could be looking at not only the expenses of repairing or replacing your tech, but also the lost revenue caused by the downtime. Do you have to go buy a new box? Short answer, No. Depending on your workload, the smallest available replacement system may provide substantially more capacity than your business currently needs. Beyond that, it will be obsolete long before you feel like you got your money’s worth out of it. The purchase price is only one part of an on-premises IBM i environment. A complete comparison may also include operating-system licensing, disaster-recovery hardware and software, implementation, system administration, monitoring, power, cooling, rack space, connectivity, security, and ongoing maintenance. Alternatively, you can rent part of a system and pay only for what your business needs. Instead of purchasing an entire physical system, a hosted model allows you to consume right-sized IBM Power capacity as a managed service. This can reduce overprovisioning while giving the environment room to adapt as business requirements change. Purchasing hardware can require a significant upfront investment before the business receives any operational benefit. A managed hosting model converts much of that infrastructure burden into a more predictable operating expense. Instead of tying up capital in equipment, organizations can preserve cash for hiring, inventory, expansion, or other strategic priorities. How Can You Make Your System More Reliable and Cut Down on Costs at the Same Time? When you rent part of a system with ProCern, you end up with a number of benefits that you just won’t get if you buy a new one for yourself. Your system, backups, maintenance, and security are all rolled up in the same cost If you buy the tech yourself, you have to buy the initial system, then a backup, then a separate space for the backup so it doesn’t go down at the same time as the main system, then you need to pay for IT and security services on top of that. When you rent the system from ProCern, you get all those features included. You can pivot quickly  When you decide to buy new tech, there’s a long process of discussion, research, approvals, purchasing, and more. Also, if you discover the new tech isn’t working for you as well as your old system did, you’re now stuck with your purchase. However, ProCern can help evaluate and implement changes without requiring you to purchase another physical system. This gives you a level of resilience you just don’t get with an in-house setup. Disaster Recovery is quicker and easier You don’t need backup systems. ProCern’s got you. A defined disaster-recovery service can reduce recovery time compared with locating hardware and rebuilding an environment after a failure. This can reduce disruption and help protect business continuity. You don’t have to scour the globe for that one IT person who still knows how to work on the old system A common problem in the tech world is that a lot of experts are aging-out and retiring. The ones who stick around know they can demand massive salaries since they’re the only ones who still know the old system. When you rent a system, we’ve already done the work of finding, vetting, and training the experts needed to keep you up and running. You stay flexible Right-sizing is not only about reducing today’s cost. If transaction volumes increase, the business acquires another company, or application requirements change, a managed platform can provide a clearer path to adding capacity. That flexibility helps reduce the risk of purchasing a system that is either too large today or too limited tomorrow. We’ve got you! When you consider what to do about your aging system, remember that you don’t have to figure it out alone. Talk to our team at ProCern and we’ll help you find exactly what you need going forward. You focus on your business, and when it comes to your tech: We’ve got you!