July 18, 2011, 12:51 PM — Mention cloud computing to a mainframe professional, and he's likely to roll his eyes. Cloud is just a much-hyped new name for what mainframes have done for years, he'll say.
"A mainframe is a cloud," contends Jon Toigo, CEO of Toigo Partners International, a data management consultancy in Dunedin, Fla.
If you, like Toigo, define a cloud as a resource that can be dynamically provisioned and made available within a company with security and good management controls, "then all of that exists already in a mainframe," he says.
Of course, Toigo's isn't the only definition of what constitutes a cloud. Most experts say that a key attribute of the cloud is that the dynamic provisioning is self-service -- that is, at the user's demand.
But the controlled environment of the mainframe, which is the basis for much of its security, traditionally requires an administrator to provision computing power for specific tasks. That's why the mainframe has a reputation as old technology that operates under an outdated IT paradigm of command and control.
It's also one of the reasons why most cloud computing today runs on x86-based distributed architectures, not mainframes. Other reasons: Mainframe hardware is expensive, licensing and software costs tend to be high, and there is a shortage of mainframe skills.
Nevertheless, mainframe vendors contend that many companies want to use their big iron for cloud computing. In a CA Technologies-sponsored survey of 200 U.S. mainframe executives last fall, 73% of the respondents said that their mainframes were a part of their future cloud plans.
And IBM has been promoting mainframes as cloud platforms for several years. The company's introduction last year of the zEnterprise, which gives organizations the option of combining mainframe and distributed computing platforms under an umbrella of common management, is a key part of IBM's strategy to make mainframes a part of the cloud, say analysts.
The company set the stage 10 years ago when it gave all of its mainframes, starting with zSeries S/390, the ability to run Linux. While mainframes had been virtualizing since the introduction of the VM operating system 30 years earlier, once IBM added Linux, you could run virtual x86 servers on a mainframe.
Over the past several years, some organizations have done just that, consolidating and virtualizing x86 servers using Linux on the mainframe. Once you start doing that, you have the basis for a private cloud.
"You have this incredibly scalable server that's very strong in transaction management," says Judith Hurwitz, president and CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, an IT consultancy in Needham, Mass. "Here's this platform that has scalability and partitioning built in at its core."
Plus, the mainframe's strongest assets -- reliability, availability, manageability and security -- are the very characteristics that companies are most concerned about as they consider rolling out major business applications in the cloud, she says.
The Sticking Point: Provisioning
But that lack of support for self-provisioning is glaring. "The mainframe is very well controlled in most organizations, often to the point where it's locked in a room and people can't access it," says Julie Craig, an analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. "[Mainframe vendors] are going to have to do some developing to allow the self-service features of the cloud."
Reed Mullen, IBM's System z cloud computing leader, says that the lack of self-provisioning is cultural, not technological. Companies could enable self-provisioning in mainframes either by using IBM's Tivoli Service Automation Manager or through custom development, he says.
Cloud Nirvana
The five characteristics of a private cloud:
1. Scalable: High levels of utilization (e.g., through virtualization), with large, mature data centers.
2. Accessible: Users can provision resources on their own.
3. Elastic: Appearance of infinite capacity on demand.
4. Shared: Workloads are multiplexed; capacity is pooled.
5. Metered consumption: Ability to pay for use with no commitment.
