IBM i — Hosting
IBM i Cloud Hosting with Built-In High Availability and Disaster Recovery
Move your IBM i workload to Paragon’s purpose-built hosting environment — and stop worrying about hardware refresh cycles, data center costs, and what happens when the power goes out.
Why host
Why Move Your IBM i to a Hosted Environment?
Your IBM i system may be critical to your business, but maintaining the hardware and infrastructure behind it doesn’t have to be.
Many organizations continue to rely on IBM i for their core business applications, ERP systems, financial operations, manufacturing processes, EDI transactions, and other systems the business can’t afford to lose. The challenge is keeping that environment available, secure, supported, and properly maintained as hardware ages and internal IT resources become harder to find.
IBM i hosting gives your organization a way to keep the platform you depend on while moving the infrastructure management to an experienced hosting partner. In our five-year TCO comparison, most shops running Power8 or older came out 22–35% ahead on hosted versus on-premises.
With Paragon, your IBM i environment runs on dedicated IBM Power infrastructure supported by a team familiar with IBM i systems. Instead of planning your next hardware refresh, maintaining a server room, monitoring systems around the clock, or developing your own disaster recovery strategy, you can focus your internal resources on your business.
IBM i Hosting Can Help You
- Eliminate the cost and complexity of maintaining aging IBM Power hardware
- Reduce the burden on internal IT teams
- Improve system availability and business continuity
- Establish a reliable disaster recovery strategy
- Maintain secure connectivity for employees, locations, and business partners
- Keep your IBM i environment patched and monitored
- Scale infrastructure as your business and workloads change
- Continue running your existing IBM i applications without replacing the platform
What’s included
A Complete IBM i Hosting Environment — Not Just Rack Space
Every Paragon hosting client gets the infrastructure, monitoring, and recovery capabilities that used to require a dedicated data center team.
Hosting tiers
Three Configurations to Fit Your Needs
From a simple hosting migration to full managed availability, choose the level that makes sense for your business.
Standard Hosting
Dedicated LPAR on Paragon-managed IBM Power hardware with 24/7 infrastructure monitoring, PTF management, and secure remote access. Ideal for companies retiring on-premise hardware without adding IT overhead.
High Availability Hosting
Standard hosting plus a warm standby partition with automatic failover. Eliminates planned maintenance downtime and protects against hardware failures — without a second data center lease.
HA + Disaster Recovery
Active HA failover at the primary site plus asynchronous replication to a geographically separated DR environment. Defined RTO/RPO with annual DR tests included.
On-premise vs. hosted
What You Stop Managing When You Move to Paragon
| Responsibility | On-Premise | Paragon Hosted |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware refresh (every 3–5 yrs) | Your cost | Paragon |
| Data center / colocation fees | Your cost | Paragon |
| 24/7 infrastructure monitoring | Your team | Paragon |
| PTF / cumulative updates | Your team | Paragon |
| HA failover management | Complex setup | Included |
| DR planning & testing | Manual effort | Scheduled |
| Application ownership | Your team | Your team |
Migration process
How a Hosting Migration Works
Environment Assessment
We document your current system — LPAR config, storage, applications, integrations, and performance baselines.
Hosted Environment Build
We provision your dedicated LPAR, configure networking and security, and set up monitoring before any data moves.
Test Migration
We do a full test restore into the hosted environment and validate applications, jobs, and integrations before cutover.
Production Cutover
Planned cutover with Paragon engineers on-call. Most migrations complete in a single maintenance window.
Who it’s for
Who Can Benefit from IBM i Hosting?
Paragon IBM i hosting is designed for organizations that depend on IBM i but don’t want the cost, risk, or responsibility of maintaining the underlying infrastructure themselves.
Aging IBM Power Hardware
If your current IBM i hardware is approaching the end of its useful life, hosting can provide an alternative to purchasing and maintaining another physical system.
Limited IBM i Expertise
IBM i environments require specialized knowledge. If your internal IT team is stretched thin or your organization has difficulty finding experienced IBM i professionals, Paragon can provide infrastructure expertise and ongoing support.
Stronger Disaster Recovery
A backup alone isn’t a disaster recovery strategy. Hosted IBM i environments can provide geographically separated recovery capabilities, defined recovery objectives, and tested procedures designed to keep your business operating when unexpected events occur.
Manufacturers & Distributors
IBM i remains an important platform for many manufacturing, distribution, and other organizations running ERP, inventory, order management, financial, EDI, and operational applications.
Companies in IT Transition
Replacing an IBM i administrator, consolidating data center infrastructure, relocating facilities, and planning for retirement all raise the same question: how do you keep IBM i applications running without keeping the physical infrastructure yourself. Hosting is one way to answer it.
Why Paragon
Why Choose Paragon for IBM i Hosting?
Hosting your IBM i environment isn’t simply a matter of putting a server in a data center. Your hosting provider needs to understand the platform, the applications running on it, the integrations connecting it to the rest of your business, and the consequences of an outage.
Paragon combines IBM i expertise with hosting, EDI, software development, and managed services. That means your IBM i environment can be supported by a team that understands more than the infrastructure underneath it.
IBM i Expertise
Our team works with IBM i environments and understands the unique requirements of organizations that depend on the platform to keep the business running.
More Than Infrastructure
Paragon’s expertise extends beyond hosting. Our services include IBM i consulting, EDI, software development, and managed services, giving you access to additional technical resources when your environment requires more than infrastructure support.
A Partner for Your Existing Environment
You don’t necessarily need to replace the applications that already run your business. We can evaluate your current environment and develop a hosting approach around your existing IBM i workloads, integrations, and business requirements.
Infrastructure Designed Around Your Needs
From standard hosted environments to high availability and disaster recovery configurations, Paragon can build a hosting solution around the level of protection and availability your business requires.
One Partner for Critical IBM i Services
When your IBM i environment, EDI integrations, and business applications are interconnected, having a technology partner that understands those relationships can simplify support and reduce the number of vendors your IT team has to manage.
AS400 hosting
AS400 Hosting for Businesses That Still Depend on IBM i
If your organization still refers to its system as an AS400, you’re not alone.
The IBM AS/400 evolved into what is now known as IBM i running on IBM Power Systems. While the technology and terminology have changed over the years, many businesses continue to use “AS400” when searching for hosting, support, modernization, and infrastructure services.
Paragon provides IBM i hosting and AS400 hosting for organizations that rely on these systems to run critical business operations.
Maybe you’re moving an aging AS400 off-premises, replacing outdated hardware, improving system availability, or building out disaster recovery. In any of those cases, Paragon can help you transition to a hosted IBM i environment while continuing to support the applications and workflows your business already depends on.
Keep Your IBM i Applications. Modernize the Infrastructure.
Moving to hosted IBM i does not necessarily mean replacing your existing applications or changing the way your employees work. Paragon can assess your current environment and develop a hosting configuration around your existing workloads, integrations, storage, connectivity, and availability requirements.
Pricing
What Determines the Cost of IBM i Hosting?
IBM i hosting costs vary depending on the size and complexity of your environment. Rather than forcing every organization into the same hosting package, Paragon evaluates your existing environment and recommends infrastructure based on your workload and availability requirements.
The best way to determine the right configuration is to evaluate your current IBM i environment and identify the infrastructure and availability requirements your business actually needs.
Factors That Affect Hosting Cost
- IBM Power processing requirements
- Memory and storage requirements
- Number and type of IBM i workloads
- High availability requirements
- Disaster recovery requirements
- Backup and retention requirements
- Network connectivity
- User and location requirements
- Third-party software and HA solutions
- Recovery time and recovery point objectives
FAQ
IBM i Hosting Questions
Is my data kept separate from other clients?
Yes. Every client runs on a dedicated LPAR with isolated storage. Paragon does not run multi-tenant shared partitions for production IBM i workloads.
What connectivity options do you support?
We support site-to-site VPN, MPLS private circuits, and secure remote access for individual users. We’ll work with your network team to design the right connectivity model.
Can you host our HA software (MIMIX, Maxava, etc.)?
Yes. We have experience with the major IBM i HA replication products and can incorporate your existing HA licensing into the hosted environment.
What are your SLA uptime guarantees?
Standard hosting targets 99.9% availability; HA configurations target 99.99%. DR RTO/RPO targets are agreed during scoping and written into your contract.
Ready to Get off Aging Hardware?
Tell us about your current environment and we’ll quote a hosted configuration that fits your uptime requirements and budget.
Get a hosting quote Call 800-966-6725