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Kershaw Mehta, senior technical staff member, IBM, says, “We have built-in virtualization within the mainframe itself. Ever since we invented PR/SM technology, there's virtualization that's happening.” He elaborates that there is virtualization at numerous levels, from LPARs, hypervisors such as z/VM and KVM, zCX (z/OS Container Extensions), and the containers and Linux guests that reside in them. 

In other words, if you want, you may run any or all aspects of the hybrid cloud directly on IBM Z, according to your own architectural decisions. As Sigler illustrates, “You could do an application that you could consider hybrid cloud all on the mainframe platform where you're taking advantage of both z/OS and perhaps Red Hat. So, with Red Hat in the containerization and characteristics on Linux, I could have part of my application that runs on that and another part that runs on z/OS and those things can work in conjunction, and I would still consider that hybrid.”

Then, if you can do it entirely on IBM equipment, why would you involve other technologies and platforms? First, because they’re already out there, and they work—but could work better when combined with IBM Z for their most critical capacities.

Sigler explains, “The IT organization is responsible for looking at all those different factors and then thinking about how that comes together, certainly in these hybrid environments. Yes, there's more vendors at play, vendor management, procurement, all of that becomes much more complicated. The integration of the system becomes more complicated. But hopefully we're doing that in a way that's thoughtful enough that we're reaping more benefits. That justifies some of the complexity. Complexity is not a bad thing inherently when you reap benefits beyond the degree of the complexity.”