Mainframe: A Resilient Model for the Modern Cloud
July 1, 2014
Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Jose Castano.
Technology is moving at a blistering pace. In today’s era of data-centric, complex environments where the lines between business and technology are becoming increasingly blurred, organizations are moving beyond virtualization to cloud computing to meet new challenges and keep up with the pace of change. Critical investments are needed to keep companies competitive, and chief among these technologies is cloud computing. In fact, Gartner expects cloud computing to become the bulk of new IT expenditure by 2016. The bottom line is, if you’re not already looking at cloud as an essential investment, you’re risking your survival into the next era of computing.
The emerging cloud-based model of computing requires systems that can provide very fast response times to huge volumes of requests. And, mission critical services such as healthcare, finance, transportation, public utilities, and other industries require very high levels of availability, security and other industrial-strength capabilities. Those attributes, qualities and requirements make the mainframe the ideal platform for such mission critical cloud-based workloads…
Cloud computing is a modern extension of a concept first developed nearly 50 years ago with the mainframe. The inherent spirit behind mainframe based computing was to serve users in remote locations at the same time, on a pay-as-you-go basis. The mainframe was introduced as the most robust, scalable system ever built, and with continued innovation the system has maintained its leadership status as one of the platforms of choice to handle today’s complex workloads including sophisticated public, private and hybrid cloud computing environments. At its core, the mainframe was designed around three key traits – virtualization, standardization and provisioning. Not coincidentally, these are the foundational requirements for true cloud implementation…
Read more from the source @ http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/3115090