Tivoli Service Automation Manager

Mention cloud computing to a mainframe professional, and he's likely to roll his eyes. Cloud is just a new name -- and a lot of hype -- for what mainframes have done for years, he'll say.

The controlled environment of the mainframe

But the controlled environment of the mainframe, and the basis for much of its security, traditionally requires an administrator to provision computing power to specific tasks. That's the basis for the mainframe's reputation as old innovation that operates in accordance with an outdated IT paradigm of command and control.

That's just 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 as then, 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 in accordance with an umbrella of common management, is a key part of IBM's strategy to make mainframes a part of the cloud, say analysts.

"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.

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.

But it's hard to find an organization that's using a mainframe in a self-provisioned cloud computing platform. Some analysts say the talk of the mainframe as cloud is just hype. The innovation may in point of fact exist, nevertheless the question is whether companies are to tell the truth implementing it, says Bill Claybrook, president of New River Marketing Technology in Concord, Mass. "If they are not automating things, if they don't have a self-service portal, at that time it's not a cloud architecture, it's just a virtualized environment," he says.

One reason why it's hard to find a self-provisioned mainframe-based cloud computing setup may be because these are nevertheless early days in the development of cloud computing. "There is incongruity between what's out there in cloud today and what these big mainframes do," says Phil Murphy, an analyst at Forrester Technology.

Business units might use a credit card to buy some extra compute cycles for a one-time project, for instance, nevertheless most companies would not run mission-critical, transaction-processing applications in the cloud.

But as cloud computing matures and as new models of mainframes begin to offer more computing power at lower costs than they do today, more companies will experiment. Hurwitz, for one, says many of her customers are looking into it, even though none are ready to talk about it openly. "It's something we're going to see a lot more of," she predicts.

The college as well runs other applications on an IBM P-Series midrange computer and IBM blades as then. Nevertheless the mainframes are "the real engine," says Bill Thirsk, Marist's vice president of information innovation and CIO.

The mainframe

Marist is getting big cost benefits from virtualizing on the mainframe. The college avoids purchasing extra server hardware, plus it saves on space, power and IT staff to manage the data center. It not only avoids having to pay extra for each application it adds to the mainframe, nevertheless also benefits from increased utilization of the mainframe, resulting in a very good return on assets, says Thirsk. He calls Marist's setup a cloud.

Marist's cloud is starting to get some attention. "Four years ago, when I started talking about this, everybody looked at me like I was crazy," Thirsk says, nevertheless as the years have passed, others have taken an interest in Marist's computing environment. He notes that he has hosted lots of visitors eager to learn what the college is doing, including representatives from 21 companies and several universities last year. "We're talking to a college in the Middle East that has over 200,000 students," he says. "There's only one way to meet that load -- with a mainframe."

Transzap compared the price of a System z business-class mainframe to that of the cluster of new servers it was going to need, and it found that the costs were about the same: about $550,000, says Marts. However the mainframe was more reliable, and Transzap liked the idea of dealing with just one vendor.

Along with several concurrent developments, zEnterprise, could make the mainframe into a true cloud platform, says Susan Eustis, president of WinterGreen Technology in Lexington, Mass. Just in the past several months, she says, IBM has improved Websphere, improved z/VM and adjusted its pricing structure -- all moves to make the mainframe more cloud-friendly, she says. Eustis thinks that IBM now has all the pieces in place to enable business units to self-provision a mainframe-based cloud.

Frequent Computerworld contributor Tam Harbert is a Washington, D.C.-based writer specializing in research, business and public policy. She can be contacted through her Web site, TamHarbert.com.