CA Technologies: Mainframe is a natural cloud platform

Many of the features of mainframes can help them to provide cloud services, such as a solid virtualization base, on-demand expansion, 9 uptime after the decimal point, unmatched failure support capabilities, excellent security, and so on.

CA Technologies Mainframe general manager Dayton Semerjian said: "In the era of cloud computing, mainframes did not disappear." On the contrary, the mainframe will emerge as an astonishing cloud platform. Mainframes are massively scalable, run important and underutilized ' big data ' and can run complex cloud workloads across a variety of architectures, such as z/OS, Linux, UNIX, and Microsoft. US velocity software last year's mainframe survey showed that 80% of users surveyed around the world thought the mainframe would be an important core part of their entire cloud computing architecture. ”

But can mainframes dominate cloud services with today's marketing methods? IT companies cannot provide cloud services "on demand" if they only provide mainframe services. After all, few mainframe users can deliver a complete IT environment with simple mouse clicks-including operating systems, databases, transaction flow monitors, and other components.

Effectively manage different workloads

To effectively manage different workloads, IT managers need to choose the most appropriate approach for each workload, ensure they are interrelated, and deliver real business services. After all, users don't care where a service is run or what it is based on, they only need fast and reliable service delivery, and it wants to provide those services as economically as possible.

Some hardware platforms are better suited to running certain workloads than other platforms. When faced with new applications, architects often view mainframes as enterprise-level servers. Since much of the data remains on mainframes, architectural drawings often include a black box with a "mainframe", with an inward arrow indicating "request", and an outward arrow indicating "data." Until recently, architects thought they were right and thought that other "flexible tools" could only be found outside the mainframe. As a result, the mainframe must be brought into the mainframe as a cloud service or as part of a cloud product.

Flexible architecture: The nature of cloud services

Assuming that future users can get most of the services on any platform, this means that the application that architects create when architecting a solution needs to conform to the standard assembly principles. Part of the component that makes up this application runs as an external cloud service, while the other runs in the virtual internal distributed environment while others run on the mainframe. However, even when we run internal cloud components, the hardware that runs these services often changes dramatically, because not all hardware has the same processing speed or memory capacity, and not all servers can run Windows, Linux or UNIX, or even the same management program.

Therefore, when designing a cloud component that contains business services, a flexible architecture is essential to enable organizations to dynamically migrate components to specific environments. Because applications can change, it organizations may have more users, or they may be able to turn from a public cloud provider to another provider for cost reasons, or they may be able to combine an overly independent component with other components. Mainframes will certainly play a role in these areas in the near future. Today, IBM's Zenterprise system enables users to run Linux systems on System Z, run distributed operating systems on Zenterprise BladeCenter Extension (ZBX), and the only thing missing is the system Z's Linux system to create cloud component tools, but this will soon change.

Flexibility and agility through mainframe and distributed cloud components

A component or program that works best at a specific time, in a particular environment, can migrate to the mainframe with minimal workload-a promise from the cloud and a dream for many business users.

If you think of a mainframe as an important cloud component, while owning its added value, IT organizations must ensure that it delivers the same flexibility and agility as other platforms. This means that we have to be able to run the underlying services (such as IFLs) so that the components that ultimately run these cloud services (such as Linux) can be implemented.

Known as "The best host products 21st century" CA Chorus mainframe management platform is a typical. It creatively combines mainframe with cloud, dramatically simplifies mainframe management, and rapidly improves the mainframe management capabilities of the enterprise IT team by increasing the productivity of the current mainframe workforce. Its role-based integration management workspace, rich data virtualization technologies, a modern graphical user interface (GUI), and advanced knowledge capture and transformation capabilities can help reduce the time and effort required to secure management of the mainframe environment, speed up problem resolution, and improve service levels, Ultimately, it will improve the productivity of current mainframe professionals and accelerate the training process for new employees.

Hardware, software, and mainframe administrators are poised to be ready. Choosing the right software allows architects and other IT personnel who design and create new environments to treat the mainframe to the same level as other platforms. With these software, mainframe managers will be freed from the limitations of where services are run. If you can easily define, transfer, or delete a service by simply clicking a mouse, the real cloud world is not far away from us.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)