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Thought Leadership
December 22, 2016
Mainframe Cloud Computing
Pravinraj S

What is Cloud Computing?

The process of storing the data and application on the remote servers, and accessing them via the internet is Cloud Computing. It consists of highly optimized virtual data centers that provide hardware, software and information resources. EX: E-mail service, Google drive, etc.

Deployment models of Cloud

·         Private Cloud – It functions solely for one organization on a private network and it’s highly secure.

·         Public Cloud – It is owned by Cloud Service Provider and offers the highest level of efficiency in shared resources.

·         Hybrid Cloud – It is a combination of the Private and Public cloud.

Service models of Cloud 

·         IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service) – It allows users to decide on their choice and then host any applications on the cloud environment.

·         PAAS (Platform as a Service) – It allows the user to create their own cloud applications using supplier-specific tools and languages.

·         SAAS (Software as a Service) – It allows user to run existing online applications

Why Cloud Computing came in to picture ?

Cloud Computing has its own benefits, some of them are mentioned below:

·         Flexibility – It is ideal for businesses with growing or fluctuating bandwidth demands. If your needs increase it’s easy to scale up your cloud capacity and vice-versa.

·         Data Recovery – Businesses of all sizes should be investing in robust disaster recovery, but Cloud Computing avoid large up-front investment for data recovery.

·         Automatic software updates – Suppliers roll out regular software updates including security updates.

·         Capital-expenditure Free – It eliminates the high cost incurred for its hardware installation and maintainence.

·         Increased collaboration – Cloud-based workflow and file sharing apps helps them to have a real time updates and gives them full visibility of their collaborations.

·         Work from anywhere – With cloud computing, if you’ve got an internet connection you can be at work.

·         Unlimited storage capacity – Cloud computing, virtually offers unlimited storage.

·         Device independence – Highly flexible so that we can work on any computer, document, application or network provided it should be residing within that cloud space.

Why major Mainframe clients are integrating their Mainframe application with Cloud Computing?

By considering the current market trend and the IT operation cost, it is really a huge challenge for most of the Mainframe clients to maintain their mainframe applications with the growing demand. Adding to that , nowday finding a IT professionals with qualified mainframe experience becoming very difficult and this is very evident for the niche Mainframe skills. Also due to the recent addition of latest and advanced technologies, now it has become a serious business ask to migrate or host the existing mainframe applications on the cloud space.

Below are the outstanding and valid points why Mainframe has to be hosted on Cloud:

·         Lower costs: It’s been a serious debate in the tech community on the subject of cloud costs. Proponents of both mainframe and cloud computing have claimed that their technology has the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). But according to one independent case study, the TCO for “running applications on commodity servers can be more than 60% less than the mainframe.”

·         More agility: This is the most prominent driving factor of any application for its longer run and if your application or platform does not have that agility factor then you will be thrown out this fast changing world. This is the challenge that we are facing with the Mainframe applications since it lacks that agility required for modern computing. Today’s programming languages and frameworks are cloud-friendly, i.e. they are ready to support the service-oriented architectures.

·         Mobility is here to stay: Most businesses are using mobile and big data applications. Mainframe team has to go through “several layers of bridging” and incorporating infrastructure software, to make it functional for mobile usage. In comparison, this flexibility is available in cloud computing.

·         Changing skill sets: A recent study by Computerworld reports that 46% of respondents noticed a shortage of programmers trained in COBOL. A majority of respondents to the same study indicated that current COBOL programmers are belongs to an older generation. This means that mainframe programming skills are becoming less of a priority for younger coders which eventually shrink the option of finding the qualified mainframe programmers in upcoming years.

Use of Cloud computing in Global Mainframe Market

IBM: Enterprise Cloud Computing and the Mainframe

IBM introduced Bluemix which is a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) where Cloud-based applications can securely send requests to and fro to z/OS systems since there is a secured connection being built between the cloud and the mainframe system.

IBM Cloud Managed Services for Z-Series systems extends the Mainframe to a scalable and highly secured cloud space thereby easily meeting the changing business needs. It provides resilient IBM® z Systems which helps to run our business and application workloads. In addition to that a securely designed system with its virtualization logical partitioning technology isolates the clients thereby preventing the access to other Z/OS environments. FYI this highly secured cloud infrastructure resides within the IBM world-class data centers, which in-turn help the customers to cut short their capital outlays for their hardware and software expenditures.

By considering the frequent changes in Customer demand as well as the IT operating cost, System Z offers a cloud delivery model that provides flexibility, quickly adapt to changes and business opportunities. There are few unique features when we deploy cloud on Z-Series system versus other platforms and one of the most important factor is the virtualization concept. On Z-Series platform with ZVM technology, it provides high degree of efficiency with which customer uses ZVM technology for their extreme virtualization.

In addition to the above, CA group is also helping major organizations in deploying the Mainframe Application host on cloud environment. Usually they start enabling the various hardware and software combinations such as operating system, databases and middleware that is required for that cloud system. Then their Infrastructure architects build the business layer on top of the application software to create appliances and assemble. Atlast they simply deploy the application on grids of hardware specifies by an ITO organization.

With advances such as hybrid computing, for example the zBx blade extension on the current IBM zEnterprise, pretty much allows you to do anything, with incredibly high levels of utilization compared to running x86.
The newest mainframe, the IBM z13* platform, is designed to deliver an optimal and cost-effective cloud platform to host enterprise workloads that can meet demanding service levels without security risks.

Aspects:

In this fast changing world, there are lot of new technology innovations and ideas seems to occur on a daily manner. But that is not the case for Mainframe since it has not reached to that level and moreover it is not trendy like Big Data or the cloud which are able to meet the customer demand in a fast agile mode. Inspite of that inability, still our legacy Mainframe giant continues to prove its supremacy and also acts as the central nervous system of major industries like Banking, Insurance, Finance and healthcare, which is something the public cloud has yet to achieve. So why not we make use of this legacy Mainframe power and try to find out the ways for its integration with the private cloud environment which offers a massive amount of storage facility and the ability to virtualize workloads, thereby providing an option to the Mainframe clients in reducing their TCO to a greater extent and also gives them a chance to modernize their application portfolios for the growing customer demands.

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