IBM to park mainframes on the cloud

IBM is gussying up its SmartCloud public cloud to make it more useful for enterprise-class customers, in the hope it can lure them away from Amazon Web Services, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and others. Big Blue is also promising to put its System z mainframes on its cloud. With the SmartCloud Enterprise 2.1 release, based on the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Sensible move

Sensible move and the whole mainframe aspect will apeal to lots, some as/400 love or whatever they clal it thesedays and ther will be alot of happy people out there, well except your local salesperson. Who in the past could sell a new bit of kit every 5 years or so will now sell a cloud package and poof, he is forefilling his own redundancy plan. Also for the companys that over the years made money hosting mainframes and the like for companies and in all effect offered cloud based services over leased lines will probably be more impacted if they havn't moved on already and those that have will have already proved to the customer that they can use such a system and open them right up to IBM's hands who will be able to cut the better margin breaks.

Also lets IBM get some extra millage out of some older kit, which whilst not end of life is not exactly the prime pick.

Now if they offer up usage for training for individuals with come cheap certification, well, they could make alot of people happy. Can't see how it can fail as they have all the locations and network etc etc in place to do this type of service, so be interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sensible move

There will be salespeople in the cloudiness. AT&T has been selling telephone switching in a cloud for 100 years and they still have tons of sales people to sell upgrades, renewals, add new workload, etc.

This might be an interesting idea for people with small mainframes running non-critical applications, but I don't see all of the banks, insurers, telecoms, governments, etc running to the cloud for their System z. A large part of the value proposition is the bullet proof security. As System z already runs at 100% utilization, it isn't as though there is a large efficiency gain either. The primary benefit I can see is for people that don't want to have mainframe specialists on staff... although most of those people work above the OS level anyway. Mainframe only needs to be patched about once in a lifetime.

[pPPPP]

Re: Sensible move

"Mainframe only needs to be patched about once in a lifetime."

That's odd, because pretty much every project I work on that involves a mainframe requires a PTF or two to be applied to it.

You're right though. Banks won't trust the cloud for anything important, and if they do, it will be their own cloud. In fact, nor will a lot of people. Basically, those who already outsource, and decide they don't want to purchase tin, will go for cloud. Everyone else will steer clear.

[Rod Talboys]

Nostalgia

Ahh... I was a CICS specialist SE way back in 1975 when a fresh newbie IBM SE, and then DB2 when this came out in 1980s or there about.

Could buy a round of drinks for a £1 in 1975 and the sky was always blue and .......

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything old is new again

Once upon a time (1950s and later) IBM owned something called the "Service Bureau Company" where you could rent a mainframe by the hour. Feds made them spin it off, and it ended up with CDC which became UNISYS.

[Hard_Facts]

Re: Everything old is new again

IBM SmartCloud on IBM Mainframe... -- Indeed a Smart Move to make some Smart Money riding on the Crazy Cloud Frenzy in the Industry.

At it's basics, Cloud Computing is -- Pools of computers, storage and networking resources that can be shared by multiple applications and managed in a collective manner using policy driven processes. Converged Systems, Unified computing for a Dynamic Infrastructure..So, it doesn't necessarily require a Mainframe to be "Always available, Always running".

[Henry Wertz 1]

It is amusing...

As Mr. Morgan alludes to in the article, IBM offering zSystem as a "cloud service" is amusing to me. IBM pioneered use of virtual machines on the IBM 360 in the 1960s, allowed for both limiting of CPU time, RAM, and disk space, as well as accounting for and billing for these. Sysplex came out in 1990, allowing for automatic data mirroring as well as system clustering with automatic, seamless failover. Sounds like a cloud to me!