L3C Ltd

Moving AIX and IBM i estates to cloud platforms

L3C Limited works on IBM AIX and IBM i systems, the Unix and IBM Power environments that many large organisations still use to run critical applications. The firm describes its work as migrating, modernising and managing these estates in public and private cloud. When a client wants to leave ageing and costly data centres, L3C designs the replacement environment, moves the workloads across and then keeps them running.

Platforms the workloads move to

Three destinations recur across the company's material. The first is Kyndryl Cloud Uplift, which the site describes as the platform formerly known as Skytap on Azure. It runs IBM Power servers inside Azure datacentres, so that an estate can connect to Azure applications with little latency. The second is IBM PowerVS, to which the firm says it moves clients on Power 10 and Power 11 servers in IBM data centres worldwide. The third is a private cloud that L3C builds in its own UK data centres for clients who still need Power 8 or Power 9 hardware. In that case the data, the backups and the hardware all stay in the UK.

The company also keeps older releases running where an application cannot yet move. Its material mentions support for AIX 5 and 6 and for Solaris SPARC 10 and 11 environments.

Resilience, recovery and test automation

The site describes work on backup resiliency, including air-gap solutions that keep copies of data isolated, and on high availability for AIX and IBM i that improves recovery time and recovery point objectives. It says it has built multi-cloud arrangements with primary and secondary sites in IBM PowerVS and in Kyndryl Cloud Uplift, and that it can build them in either order.

On the process side, the firm cites disaster recovery switchovers in Skytap that run automatically, and test deployments built with Ansible and Azure DevOps. In one example it says test cycles that used to take weeks now take hours. Its own tools, L3C Monitor and L3C Automate, are listed for monitoring and automating these environments.

Two ways to engage

The company says it works through two routes. Many of the large global system integrators use its Kyndryl Cloud Uplift expertise, so L3C can work behind their projects. It also contracts directly with end clients. Either way, the service covers the design of the landing zone, the migration of the AIX and IBM i applications and, if the client chooses, ongoing managed services. Those managed services cover operating systems, patching, system administration, cloud networking and database administration, including Oracle, and the site lists Linux environments among the systems it runs.

Independence, certification and data location

The firm presents itself as independent of any single cloud provider, which it says lets it advise on the platform that fits a particular client's needs, using what it calls decision roadmaps. It describes its migration pricing as fixed per logical partition, so that a client can plan its budget in advance. It says it has moved clients in retail, financial services, insurance, industrial companies, critical energy infrastructure, the public sector and healthcare.

L3C states that it holds ISO and Cyber Essentials certifications, which it presents as the basis for building and migrating environments with security in mind. Clients can choose where their data sits, in the UK or in the EU, and the firm offers both short and long engagements depending on the scale of the work.