Are Mainframes Cheaper Than Outside Cloud Services?

Enterprising Developments

Are Mainframes Cheaper Than Outside Cloud Services?

Joe McKendrick
Insurance Experts' Forum, August 26, 2013

  

At the end of last month, IBM announced a new mainframe server — the zEnterprise BC12 mainframe — which retails for only $75,000 (incredibly cheap by mainframe standards) and is intended to support private cloud computing. The system also supports Linux.
What is striking about the announcement is IBM's calculation for the cost of the system, per virtual server — as low as $1.00 per day, the vendor says. One mainframe box will run up to 520 virtual servers.
If this price point holds up, it could give public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services a run for its money. Internal mainframe power could be priced across the enterprise even more attractively as outside cloud services. For insurance companies still steeped in the mainframe and large systems world but wanting to extend more applications to cloud, this may be an alternative to consider to engaging with outside cloud providers.
Gabriel Lowy, for one, is bullish on the emerging role of the mainframe as a private cloud system. In a recent analysis in Big Data News, he points out that these larger servers have a lot of the essential components required to support cloud computing.
As Lowry puts it: “If one defines cloud as a resource that can be dynamically provisioned — allocated and de-allocated on demand — and made available with good security and management controls, then all of that functionality already exists on the mainframe. IBM is also a contributor to OpenStack, adding z/VM hypervisor and z/VM operating system APIs to the community.” The new mainframe model also supports self-provisioning, he adds.
When analyzing costs associated with energy consumption and system administration, the mainframe compared favorably to distributed architectures such as Windows or Linux on Intel-based servers, he adds. “When looking at centralized and consolidated infrastructures the question now is whether the mainframe is worthy of greater consideration than it currently receives, both if the organization already has such systems in place but also perhaps as a new investment.”

Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant, blogger and frequent INN contributor specializing in information technology.

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Evangelizing Mainframe

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SHARE Keynote: Modern Security Model Gets Medieval

In today’ information age, how we approach security is akin to feudalism with serfs (individual users) ceding their data to feudal lords (technology providers and governments) who pledge to protect them and their data. In this model, presented by BT Chief Security Technology Officer Bruce Schneier at the Aug. 13 keynote at SHARE Boston, the challenge becomes “Surviving in a Feudal Security World.”

Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He produces a blog, Schneier on Security, and an enewsletter with some 250,000 subscribers.

In his address, he explained that previously, security had always been individual users’ problem. People buy a computer, they need to load spam-filtering software on it; they access a network, they must get a firewall to protect their information and systems. However, that model was like buying a car without brakes standard, Schneier noted. “You wouldn’t buy a car from a dealer who said, ‘You’ll need brakes, here are some places you can buy them on the way home.’ Computers are unsafe to drive on the Internet without security, but those are considered ‘extras.’ ”

That model is changing, largely because of a few trends, he noted. The first being cloud. More and more, personal data is controlled by somebody else, for example, their personal email accounts, or their photos, likes and relationships shared on social media. The second trend is the loss of control of personal devices.

“I have no control of the security on my iPhone—Apple does,” Schneier explained. “Someone else controls the data and the device we use to control our data. In this new model, someone else controls your data and its security.”

People don’t know (or often care) about how they protect their data; they just expect them to do it. “In this feudal security world, we as users pledge our allegiance to a more powerful company that in turn promises to protect us,” he added. “I like it as a metaphor because it’s a great analogy historically, and everyone is watching ‘Game of Thrones’ these days.”

Just as the medieval feudal system arose for good reason, so has the modern version, he noted. Both historically and today, it’s a response to a dangerous world in which people seek protection. By and large, businesses like Google or Apple, do a better job of providing security than most individuals can on their own.

However, feudalism has its negatives, not the least of which is its lack of transparency, he said. A business might give your data to the government, and for companies there’s no way to audit the data entrusted to these service providers. Feudal security has risks as well, since companies act in their best interest.

“This is a trade off,” he summarized. “We give up some control to get protection from the vendors we can’t provide ourselves.”

The feudalism model is fundamentally based on trust. Providers need people to trust them with their data, photos and friends; information about their searches; what they watch; and where they go. It’s also a model based on power.”

Schneier noted that the tools of power are:

• Censorship or content filtering
• Propaganda, “the first business model of the Internet”
• Surveillance, “the second business model of the Internet”
• Use control, where providers restrict what apps you can use on their devices

“Trends in technology will only exacerbate these issues,” Schneier predicted. “That’s one trajectory that’s not positive.”

As technology evolves, the powerless often nimbly and quickly take advantage of it to gain power—sometimes by committing crimes or by promoting social change. For example, opponents of a dictatorial government can use Twitter and social media to organize meetings or rallies. At the same time, governments respond, though more slowly, to technology. So secret police forces can use social media information to track down and arrest people trying to organize antigovernment rallies, Schneier explained. “What happens to us in the middle? We peasants just get buffeted by the greater forces.”

But all is not lost. A different course is possible, he added. What’s needed is for people to engage and enter into a complex debate about the future of the Internet. That includes complex issues of personal privacy, surveillance, retention of data, etc. “The debate required to make such policy is probably more complex than climate change.”

Through debate and new policy, eventually, the power imbalance can be reduced, just as with medieval feudalism, Schneier added. Documents like the Magna Carta set rules for government, outlining its responsibilities to the people, striking a better balance. “What we need is an Internet Magna Carta to explain the responsibilities these corporate feudal lords have with our data.”

Posted: 8/20/2013 1:01:01 AM by Mike Westholder | with 0 comments

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Reinvented mainframe technology keeps big iron alive

The mainframe is not going into terminal decline. On the contrary, mainframe technology is evolving to keep itself relevant and necessary to enterprise IT operations.
IT observers have declared impending doom for the mainframe for at least the past quarter-century. They bBlame the proprietary architecture, the lack of developers, the aging-out of mainframe administrators and big iron's inability to match scale-out PC server farms and grids. Taken together, these old arguments should havekilled the mainframe by now, but with mainframe development on the right track, none of them holds true.
This is an era in which IT seems content to spend the same amount each year on computing -- focusing much of its efforts on saving money. In 2012, after a 10% to 20 % dip in revenue in the first three quarters, IBM saw mainframe revenue jump 56% in the fourth quarter. IBM's mainframe business is on a three-year streak of revenue growth. Its Unix/Linux (System p) and Windows (System x) alternatives saw declines in 2012. In fact, if 2012 was proclaiming anything, it was the eventual death of Unix/Linux. But I don't believe that's true either.

The mainframe fully reinvented

About five years ago, I suggested that IBM make the mainframe a "hub" -- a fully networked node tuned for certain types of workloads, so that data centers don't have to choose between the mainframe and something else and can't have both. IBM has focused mainframe development on turning big iron into a full participant in the enterprise architecture. All of IBM's major enterprise software products -- administration, security, data management, development -- are on approximately the same track inside and outside of the mainframe, and most apps can easily and even dynamically move between mainframe and non-mainframe servers. This makes it far easier for data centers to use the mainframe flexibly, taking advantage of its inherent robustness, security and high-end transactional scale-up.
IBM's mainframe development plans for 2013 appropriately are less dramatic than they were in the past five years. The "bridging" architectures of zEnterprise and PureSystems, IBM's emerging converged infrastructure line, form an adequate foundation for future mainframe development, including enterprise architectures.
Data center administrators and IT developers will use future mainframes as more or less transparent parts of a fully modern, overall enterprise architecture. The mainframe still fails to support Windows in public cloud architectures adequately, which could limit, though not reverse, mainframe use.
Few argue today that the mainframe's proprietary architecture cannot keep pace with the evolution of hardware and software technology. IBM says that a new generation of system administrators has adequate skills to operate mainframes; some businesses are buying new mainframes with a preference for z/OS up front rather than Linux. There are few major barriers to software, either.
Evolving mainframe technology is attracting new customers, even in the U.S., because the old knocks on the mainframe no longer apply.

Mainframes' offerings for big data, scale-up computing

We all hear periodic outbursts of "the death of …." Sometimes this death is justified -- no one who had the dubious joy of programming for dumb terminals mourns their death. But some architectures are proclaimed dead while they're still very much alive, stultifying innovation on them and wasting their unique strengths for next-generation computing. For very good reasons, the mainframe refuses to stay decently dead.
The mainframe pushes the limits of scale-up computing. While scale-out grid systems have achieved some significant successes -- Google made notable advances in language comprehension and translation with its thousands of servers' divide-and-conquer approach -- on a per-processor basis, mainframe scale-up's tight integration offers performance advantages over non-mainframe scale-out's loosely coupled networking. Mainframes also offer advantages for total cost of ownership, robustness, security and run-the-business-app experience.
Wayne Kernochan is president of Infostructure Associates, an affiliate of Valley View Ventures. This document is the result of Infostructure Associates-sponsored research. Infostructure Associates believes that its findings are objective and represent the best analysis available at the time of publication.