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MAINFRAME MASTER INNOVATIONS
The Wonderful Rightness of Hybrid Cloud on IBM Z
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By Reg Harbeck
Here’s the thing: The moment you bring a mainframe into the equation, the weakest links in the chain become subject to the same scrutiny and requirements as the critical systems they connect with. A succinct way to refer to these requirements in the mainframe world is RAS, which stands for reliability, availability and scalability / serviceability / security. Suddenly, this key set of characteristics of the mainframe become criteria for a successful hybrid cloud implementation that includes IBM Z.
RAS must remain in place, according to Mehta. “It's not as if you need to give up on any of those if you start deploying your applications in a hybrid cloud environment or, for example, making Z part of your hybrid cloud environment. That entails things like failover, recoverability, and being able to secure a complete hybrid cloud environment.”
Marna Walle, z/OS installation, upgrade and management, IBM, makes it clear that connecting with non-Z platforms is both desirable and necessary. “A lot of people are still going to want to keep some of their mission-critical workloads on premises. They're going to need the data served and protected by z/OS encrypted and all the aspects that make it so perfect to stay right on z/OS so that residency is going to be pretty important,” she says.
But clients also need to make key information processed by COBOL and legacy applications accessible to other platforms through the cloud, again necessitating a hybrid approach.
Hybrid cloud on IBM Z works, it’s here and it’s the future. Mehta concludes, “Do not think that your legacy applications are things that could not be deployed in a cloud environment. They very well can. Do not think that your legacy applications, especially applications that are written in COBOL could not be containerized. They very well can.
“And then finally, from a standpoint of IBM Z itself, people might very well think that IBM Z does not belong in a hybrid cloud environment. We have good examples of where customers have deployed IBM Z in a cloud environment, both in a private cloud environment and in a hybrid cloud environment. Those are all things that are possible.”
In other words, not only can the hybrid cloud make non-mainframe services available to mainframe workloads, and not only can mainframe processing and data be served beyond the mainframe using the hybrid cloud, but the very applications and data themselves, including COBOL, can be subject to containerization in an ultimate manifestation of a 360-degree hybrid cloud architecture. Welcome to the future.
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