Last January, Big Blue revealed one of its more immediate plans: to provide cloud-hosted virtual machines to run IBM z/OS, a highly secure and scalable operating system for running essential applications. The time has finally come.
In his presentation, the financial director of the company, James Kavanaugh, highlighted how this type of equipment has substantially improved revenues in the company’s infrastructure area. And in turn, he predicted the impact it would have on IBM’s revenues, which in the last quarter of 2021 reached 16.7 billion dollars for a total of 57.35 billion dollars in the last year, that is, 2.2 billion more than the last year.
The z mainframe is a system that also brings a lot of computing power in addition to the resources of the platform thereby helping to drive the transformation of any business and speed up the entire innovation process. All this in a context of stable and secure environment that any organization needs to improve the performance of the most important workloads and, of course, face the future challenges that arise.
This will be offered first in a closed “experimental” beta under the IBM Wazi brand. as a service and not on-demand access to z/OS as previously announced, although on the downside you won’t be able to jump to the IBM Cloud and create a virtual mainframe with it.
But beware! even if they arrive this thursday these first cloud mainframes will not be visible in the user’s IBM cloud until they are an IBM customer, at which point they will also need to use IBM’s sales process to get on the accept list and access that feature. Once accessible, the service offers the opportunity to build and run custom images of your local mainframe.
It is also intended that the use of cloud mainframes will only be used for testing and development.Which is strange given that infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is wildly popular and IBM doesn’t offer this option for mainframes. Which is in keeping with IBM’s way of making it easy to develop applications for z/OS, either from scratch or as part of migration efforts. An aspect to take into account since mainframes are a vital part of IBM’s profits.
So encouraging the development of more mainframe applications is a positive for the brand, especially since mainframe pricing is often based on consumption, much like IaaS.
At the moment, z/OS virtual machines can be created in these specific regions: Japan (Tokyo), Brazil (São Paulo), Canada (Toronto), and the United Kingdom (London). IBM has also published educational resources and other information for those interested in the cloud mainframe.
