Get Out of the Data Center and into the Cloud: Skytap

Skytap makes it easy to harness the benefits of the cloud for traditional applications, virtual training, and business continuity in both IBM Power and x86 environments. Picture being able to take your traditional applications out of the data center and gain the agility, flexibility, and scalability the public cloud provides. What if your business could innovate, scale, and become more responsive to customers’ needs, not just with cloud-native applications, but with the traditional applications that form the backbone of your business? Consider the possibilities if all this could be done without having to rearchitect or rewrite these applications. Skytap was designed to run your traditional applications in the public cloud, whether you prefer Microsoft Azure or IBM Cloud. Skytap is the only cloud service that supports AIX, IBM i, and Linux on IBM Power Systems alongside x86 workloads. You can migrate your Power-based applications and workloads directly into Skytap in their native format without rewriting.

Once applications are running in Skytap, you can start harnessing the benefits of core cloud capabilities, including capacity ondemand, self-service provisioning, and high availability. Customers use Skytap throughout their businesses, from improving the reliability of production environments and ensuring business continuity to accelerating application development and providing replica environments for virtual training labs, sales demos, and proofs of concept (POCs).

The Skytap Solution

Skytap functions like a software-defined data center (SDDC), providing the compatibility and simplicity your business needs to move traditional applications from on-premises data centers to a multi-cloud environment. It runs on IBM Power Systems hardware in Azure and IBM data centers, so that your organization can migrate and run applications natively in your cloud of choice.

Production and Disaster Recovery

Data center hardware continues to become more powerful, but it’s also more expensive to keep up to date. Skytap helps reduce or eliminate investments in new hardware, data center facilities, and the staff needed to manage them. Once applications have been moved out of the data center and into the cloud, you can modernize them at your pace to improve functionality, reliability, and performance. To ensure business continuity, use Skytap to provide high availability (HA) and faster, more automated disaster recovery (DR) for data center-based applications. Skytap’s scalable architecture and powerful API allow you to continue using your existing on-premises HA, DR and backup tools natively in the cloud of your choice, while moving away from inefficient solutions like tape backup systems.

Application Development and Test

Developers and testers in traditional software environments compete for finite physical resources. Dev and test systems often fail to accurately represent what’s currently in production due to configuration drift. The result is infrequent, poor quality software releases and fragile applications. Skytap provides replicas of production environments that your developers and testers can copy immediately and as often as desired, paving the way to agile development and a modern software development lifecycle (SDLC). Agile, along with the adoption of DevOps practices, improves business agility, drives innovation, and enables the continuous delivery of customer facing applications and services.

Virtual Training

Global remote working has driven an explosive demand for virtual training and self-paced offerings that on-premises infrastructure can’t support. Physical labs only support in-person participation and maintaining them is often time-consuming, expensive, and technically challenging. Skytap, through its Course Manager Subscription add-on, allows you to deliver easy to use, high-performance virtual lab environments that are essential for providing successful virtual technical education to a global workforce. Training teams can quickly provision labs, distribute access details, and share training assets. Students gain access to their training labs and assets from wherever they’re connected, whether for self-paced, on-demand courses or instructor-led training.

Instructors can create virtual classrooms for multiple students, easily adding or removing attendees up to the last minute. Operations staff and instructors have full visibility and control, with comprehensive administrative tools and over-the-shoulder access. Support for the LTI standard provides straightforward integration with existing Learning Management Systems (LMSs), making it easy to add virtual labs to both instructor-led and on-demand classes.

Demo and Proofs of Concept

Prospective customers need to see products in action with well-executed product demos or POCs tailored to their specific needs. However, sales teams often lack the requisite infrastructure and resources to configure custom environments for each demo, often resulting in a poor, unpredictable user experience. Course Manager by Skytap lets your sales teams deliver end-to-end demos and POCs that mirror production environments without building costly infrastructure. Demo teams can build and clone easy-to-use templates that let your customers learn, understand, and test drive products from wherever they are, using just a web browser. Give prospects access to self-guided, on-demand demos so they can get hands-on experience with your offerings at their convenience.

Q. Why Choose Skytap?

Public cloud providers largely focus on cloud-native applications and workloads and, as such, typically require significant configuration and rewriting or rearchitecting in order to migrate traditional applications, workloads, or complex environments. Skytap abstracts many of the complexities found in cloud environments so that traditional applications operate in their native format, while retaining all their environmental configurations, including infrastructure, storage, networking, OS, middleware, and memory state. Your teams can use and work with applications and workloads as they always have, while gaining access to cloud capabilities they didn’t have before.

Brad Schick, CEO

“Skytap makes it easy to get business-critical applications out of the data center and into the cloud.”