“Zed’s dead, baby.” These may be the immortal words of a
motorbike wielding Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, but also some of the
first words uttered to me when I made the decision to move into the System z
software team. The perception of mainframe is simple: it’s a dinosaur. In a
world where companies like Apple render their previous generations of hardware
‘vintage’ or ‘obsolete’ after 5 years, and release software upgrades annually
and free of charge, how can a product that is celebrating it’s 50th
birthday this April still be relevant? Equally, as the current IT landscape
evolves towards mega trends such as Cloud, Mobile and Big Data, how can this ‘vintage’
platform keep up?
In 1969, IBM and the mainframe helped NASA put the first men
on the moon, and now, 45 years later, focus is still skywards for putting work
in the Cloud (tenuous link). Cloud has always been part of the mainframe, since
its inception VMs have been a basic component of the mainframe hardware. Despite
this, for many x86 seems the natural choice for Cloud workloads: cheap and
simple. However, while x86 serves
the commodity workloads, System z is undeniably the most suitable choice for
high complexity and high criticality Cloud workloads. The mainframe is famed
for unmatched reliability and the ultimate security choice, something other
platforms simply cannot contend with. What’s more, in the market where IBM
System z Cloud mainly operates (private, in-house), Cloud computing costs less
per virtual machine on IBM mainframe vs x86* and therefore the power usage per
VM is significantly lower on z, in turn improving OpEx costs.
Cloud is a
huge part of the System z strategy, with a focus on orchestration choices for
our customers- in order to automate deployment and lifestyle management which
results in a reduced time to market and improved productivity.
With the average System z box standing at 2 metres tall, how
can it possibly be described as mobile? With many believing the mainframe can
only be a solution for banking giants and top secret agencies, System z is
often pushed aside in customer mobile strategy. But mobile is no simple task.
With over 200 million employees bring their own devices who, on average, are
checking their mobiles 30 times per hour, and never being more than an arm’s
reach away from their beloved smart phone; demand for a powerful, secure
platform is high. Enterprise
mobile strategy plays into this ideally: from seamless building and development
of applications from Rational; to word class security and management,
preventing costly breaches in Tivoli;
and extending capability and user flexibility. While mobile can generate
billions of transactions; System z can handle more than 30 billion transactions
a day. While the billions of mobile users globally expect real time data;
System z on average has less than 6 minutes of downtime a year. So despite not
being pocket-sized, System z is the clear choice for business transformation
into the mobile world.
We now generate more data in two days than we did in total
up until 2003. This data can either be wasted, sit on tapes and disks and hard
drives until the day when the auditors finally tell us we can destroy it. Or it
could become an incredibly powerful business tool. Businesses who implement
analytics tools outperform their competitors by over two times. Which CIO
wouldn’t want that? But there are hurdles. Many companies grow through
acquisition, and even if they don’t, they can develop a large server sprawl,
which in turn creates siloed workloads and no single repository of data for
companies. System z can provide that. By making sure your data is available, consolidated,
and secure, System z can form the basis of your analytics and data management
strategy. Additionally, creating a new analytics environment can take up to 6
months at a cost of approximately $250,000. However, with the simplicity of the
System z architecture, companies can have deployed analytics environment in 2
days at $25,000. Not bad for an out of date, dinosaur platform.
So is z still relevant? Well, if you want an incredibly
powerful infrastructure, which boasts maximum security and unmatched
reliability: yes. If you want to be able to keep ahead of the latest IT trends,
with value and strategy plans spanning mobile, cloud and data analytics: you
bet it is.
Zed’s back, baby.
*based on
275 VMs