At Skytap Academy Live, East Coast Metal Distributors (ECMDI) was featured in a customer showcase session to discuss how it uses Skytap to run IBM i systems in the cloud. William Garner, VP of IT at ECMDI was joined by Skytap Director of Field Engineering Jason Scott.
Watch the 15-min session video below or keep reading below for an overview.
ECMDI is an HVAC distribution company, and was acquired by Watsco in 2004, the largest distributor of air conditioning, heating and refrigeration equipment and related parts and supplies in the HVAC/R distribution industry. The company has been a Skytap customer since 2019.
In the session at Skytap Academy Live, William details how ECMDI decided to move its IBM i systems to the cloud and why it chose Skytap as its infrastructure-as-a-service provider:
- ECMDI uses IBM i (A/S400) to run its ERP and it was working well
- The company was coming to the end of its IBM i warranty and looked at doing a refresh of the hardware or moving to the cloud
- In the Watsco portfolio of companies, there was a trend of taking legacy ERP systems and applications and finding a way to extend their use rather than replatform onto a more modern platform
- ECMDI explored cloud solutions because it wanted to experience the benefits of greater resiliency, reliability, and scalability that comes with the cloud
- The company chose Skytap on Azure due to the ability to virtualize its IBM i setup in Azure
- ECMDI completed a migration and now has Production, Disaster Recovery, and Dev/Test IBM i systems running across two Skytap regional data centers using logical journal replication
“There’s a lot of fear sometimes whenever you’re making a cloud migration, and it makes a big difference whenever you’re working with a partner that you know is going to be there beside you and help you through it. Skytap was there with us the whole time working through issues that came up and now we’re running seamlessly.”
Learn more about Skytap for IBM i workloads here.
Click here to watch more content from Skytap Academy Live and stay tuned for our next live event.
