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>> Hello. My name is Wenyi Sun.
I'm a Product Manager from Microsoft.
Today, we have George Stamos from Skytap,
join me to give you an overview of Skytap on Azure,
and how it accelerate your Cloud migration
for your applications running on IBM power.
Our agenda today will start from introduction of Skytap on Azure.
Then what's the benefit of this offer.
I will talk about customer use cases, solution overview.
Then we will take a look at a network architecture,
and we'll talk about availability.
Lastly, George will give us a demo.
These days, enterprise really eager to
move all their applications to Cloud.
However, for business critical applications,
including a lot of those running on IBM power,
are not designed to run in Cloud.
So those applications are left behind in datacenter.
Skytap on Azure is a Cloud Service designed specifically to
natively run your IBM power in X86 applications in Azure.
It supports workloads including AIX, IBM i,
Enterprise Linux on IBM power system,
and X86 systems in one single converged platform.
Skytap on Azure, you're able to rapidly
migrate your IBM power applications in Azure,
and run your X86 workloads.
You can integrate with Cloud Native Azure services and
extend the value of your traditional applications.
Skytap on Azure can truly accelerate your Cloud, journey to Azure.
Now, what benefit will Skytap on Azure bring to you?
First, it's compatible.
You can completely live and shape
your whole applications to Azure
without refactoring and rearchitecture.
Secondly, through self-service, you are able
to get access to on-demand resources.
Third, it will extend your value of traditional applications.
Now you will have access to a rich amount of API,
and you will access low latency Azure services.
Lastly, these offer enables rapid development.
You will get access to a full rack
of application environment that will
accelerate your software delivery
to create time for product innovation.
By using Skytap on Azure,
you are able to increase your developer productivity,
testing coverage and also accelerate
your DevOp adoption through on-demand application environment.
For a production workload,
you can run production AIX, IBM i,
Enterprise Linux, and X86 solution with
an SLA of 99.95 percent availability.
Also, you're able to securely
connect your on-premise applications.
Now we talk about disaster recovery.
Through Skytap on Azure,
you are able to get cold, warm,
hot disaster recovery that
meets the enterprise continuity requirement.
Lastly, for your hands-on lab purpose
that's through Skytap on Azure,
you are able to educate and train your customers,
your Sales Teams with our On-demand Virtual Hands-on Labs.
Isn't that awesome?
Skytap on Azure is a long-term solution for you.
It provide you business stability with
apps running on Cloud infrastructure.
From managed visibility and a control perspective,
I want to specifically mention that you're able to create
and manage application environment template.
It can be self provisioned,
can be cloned, and it can be shared.
To maximize your investment dollars,
we recommend you to choose
the size that's based on your actual workload,
try to avoid unnecessary over-provisioning.
Remember, you can always resize as needed.
From price-model perspective, you can mix and match,
pay-as-you-go model, and reserved capacity model.
This is the network architecture.
With Azure ExpressRoute, you are able to connect Azure VMs,
on-premise applications,
and your traditional applications run on Skytap on Azure.
We should give you the flexibility to migrate over time,
scale out as needed,
and support hybrid application environment.
Also, if any disaster recovery events happens.
Skytap on Azure is currently available in US east.
We plan to expand to three more regions.
Those are US South Central,
Western Europe, and Southeast Asia.
This offer is also available to transact the Azure marketplace.
What is better is it's also Mac eligible.
That means, Skytap on Azure offer will contribute to
your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment
if you have Mac agreement with Microsoft.
It's really good. With that,
you should have a brisk understanding of Skytap on Azure.
Now, are you excited to hear some demos?
Let's welcome George from Skytap to give us a demo
about how to deploy and run Skytap on Azure. George.
>> Thank you, Wenyi,
for that wonderful overview.
I could not be more excited about what we're able to bring to
bear from Skytap as it runs on Microsoft Azure. My name is George.
I'm a part of our Strategic Alliances Team here at Skytap.
What we're going to do, is we're going to
go through a customer demo,
so you'd be able to see what are customer experiences when they
move into the Skytap solution as it runs on top of Azure.
As Wenyi talked about,
the central thing to keep in mind when you're
thinking about Skytap on Azure,
is that it has the ability to
work with these more legacy environments.
Typically, these environments, they have an element of IBM power.
Maybe they're running AIX,
they're running IBM i,
and they're boat-anchored in the datacenter.
They've been boat-anchored on PRAM.
What Skytap has the ability to do is,
pull up that anchor,
bring them into Azure.
That's what we're going to work through.
In this particular case,
the customer was very interested in getting into
some innovation as it related to their legacy workloads.
Let's jump into it.
What you see up here on your screen is the Skytap portal.
This is where, in conjunction with Azure,
you can manage these legacy workloads.
I'm going to start up here at the top in the environment section.
I do that because this customer had this environment.
It was running on PRAM,
and they went through an exercise that says,
"Let's take a look at all the L parts.
Let's take a look at the networks.
Let's take a look at any of
the legacy X86 components that need to come in."
They were able to wire those up so that they go
directly across in what we call a VM Import.
This VM Import is able to bring those components in to Azure,
so that they natively run within what you see here on the screen.
The upshot of that is that they get a template.
This customer specifically had
a template that had some complexity associated with it.
You can almost think about a template
as a representation of what a datacenter looks like.
It's got multiple facets to it,
multiple components associated with it.
In this customer case,
they had a Db2 server.
It was running on multiple AIX machines.
They had a domain controller an F5 Load Balancer,
bunch of different versions,
IBM i, etc etc.
The important point here,
all these components are meant to work together in terms of
this boat-anchored environment that
they had in the corner of that datacenter.
Once they had the template,
all they needed to do is click on "New Environment."
In this case, maybe I'll give it a task.
Click on "Deploy".
It's going to take a whole collection of that environment,
all of the networks,
all of that config files,
all of the data, and create
a net new environment for them to start utilizing.
When he talked about it,
there's a lot of different use cases
that you can bring to bear here,
certainly in the case of disaster recovery.
Those different types of scenarios.
In the case of this customer,
they were particularly interested in
getting into elements of innovation.
Particularly, they were interested in how they could accelerate
their development and test process that they
were applying to this traditional environment.
What they did, couple of
different things they brought to the table,
they basically wanted to get into a bit of a container strategy,
get into some continuous integration, some continuous development,
improvement efforts, and they needed it to
work in conjunction with
the environment that you see up here on the screen.
With that, they carved out
another team that was specific to those functions,
and that team created
another template that's meant to
work directly with this legacy environment.
They called it their CD tools template.
There, they had a couple of Docker host,
a Docker registry, a Jenkins for continuous integration.
When you click on "Add VMs",
what it does is it takes that CD tools template,
and stitches it into
the legacy environment that you see up here on the screen.
Now, the beauty of this is
that you don't need to be networking expert,
you don't need to be a developer to do this type of work,
it's very easy to perform these types of functions.
Now, let's dig in a little bit into what
this environment has going on under the hood.
Quite a complex network topology
that's associated with this environment.
It's very important to note that when
you think about where this customer started,
their on-premise instantiation of this environment,
it looks now the same as it exists in Azure.
When you see all those different networks represented there
across the map there,
that matches exactly what it looked like on-prem.
In the case of this customer,
they're doing this work around innovation and testing,
they know that they're talking apples to apples.
These LPARs, it's powered here under the hood in Azure.
We're not talking emulation here,
they're doing their testing,
they're doing their innovation.
All of that matches.
Now, that's not to say that you can't make changes,
you most certainly can.
If we jump into some of this,
let's say that we're going to make some changes
here to our IBM iBox,
you have the ability to insert Nick's,
you have the ability to modify MAC addresses,
various components to that.
Similarly on the hardware side,
there are specific hardware elements that are brought to
bear when it comes to these power frameworks.
Things like CPW, if you're familiar with the IBM my world,
you have the ability to modify these elements, so that again,
they match what it looked like on-prem,
or maybe you want to beef that up once it gets into Azure.
You have the ability to do
that literally with a click of a button.
Critically important, and when he talked about this in
terms of being able to get into this cost-savings model,
you also have the ability when you run
these workloads to choose between,
am I going to do it on an hourly basis,
is this going to be more of a DevTest workload,
or I'm going to spin it up when I need it,
I'm going to spin it down when I don't?
Or is this going to be more of a high availability scenario,
or a DR scenario where it's going to be running all the time?
You have the ability to choose what type of
a subscription model and a billing cycle you
want to get into as it relates to these workloads.
Then lastly, certainly with storage,
you have the ability to make any kind of changes you want to
make from an underlying disk layout and sizing perspective.
Now, if I hop over to the network settings here real quick,
you'll start to see some of
that complexity surface when we looked at that map.
This is where you have the ability,
literally with clicks of a button to start
designing what that network framework looks like.
Critically important, all of this is involved in that template.
When you click on that button to create the environment,
it's automatically got a private network connection
that's associated back on-prem.
It has those native
built-in connections that are a part of that template.
Every time you stamp one of these out,
you don't need to reinvent the wheel.
Now, within this environment specifically,
we've made a couple of changes.
We stitched in some of
the continuous integration, continuous delivery tools,
we touched some other frameworks to this environment,
and you have a couple of different options now that you
can employ when it comes to this environment capability.
One is you can copy it, if you want,
you can make a net new perfect clone,
or what we often see,
and certainly in the case of this customer,
once they had done a bit of work,
they wanted to save it as a template,
and they wanted to pack it back on the shelf,
and pull it back off the shelf if they needed to.
This is our Save As Template capability that you
now have associated with these legacy workloads.
All you need to do, click on "Save As Template", and boom,
it's going to pack that on the shelf for you,
and you can pull it off the shelf
later if you want to start working with it.
It's very easy to perform these types of functions,
and it's very unique in the sense that, now,
in many ways we're saving a template of
the entire data center or that corner
of the data center that was boat anchored there.
Just a couple of other things that I'll show you if
we jump back here to the dashboard,
one thing I will show you,
which people don't often see is that when we say IBM i,
we mean IBM i.
What's interesting is that many IBM i folks that are out there,
they prefer green screen.
When you're in Azure,
you're in Skytap on Azure,
and you're working with these underlying power systems,
we're talking in green screen.
This is an emulation.
This is real power under
the hood that you can use for these environments.
It's very simple to connect to these machines.
You can 5250 in,
or you can simply bring it up in the web browser.
Last thing I'll mention is that
the customer in this case was very,
very interested in how they start to
control and administer some of this work.
Clearly, you saw and when you use overview,
this is nicely paired to your Azure ecosystem,
through the express route connection,
you can get into those native services.
In this case, the customer actually set up developers,
testers directly into this portal
that could come in here and manage its soup to nuts.
What do I mean by that?
Well, first, every single thing within Skytap running on Azure,
fully audited, you can fully report against it,
and you can always clearly see
your usage and the limits that are at play.
As you're doing this copy work,
as you're doing this innovation,
all of that is surface for you and
you have clear visibility into it.
With that, very quick recap,
this customer boat anchored in the data center.
They had this legacy environment in the corner.
They were able to take that,
directly import that via the VM LPAR import service,
wrap that into a template with all the network complexity.
They then had the ability to,
literally with the push of a button,
create instances of that that they
could start using for their own innovation.
In this case, they dramatically
increased their ability to test against this legacy environment,
and get into some of the net new elements that they wanted to get
into around containers in relation to that environment.
With that, just a very quick overview there
of Skytap on Azure in action,
and I'll turn it back over to Wenyi.
>> Wow, thank you , George.
That's a great demo.
To summarize, Skytap on Azure is
a Cloud-native service that can help
you to migrate IBM Power to Azure,
and it can accelerate your Cloud journey.
Here are some additional resources
if you're interested to know more.
Feel free to reach out to us for more questions.
Thank you for watching us.
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