Blockchain technology – if you were to believe in some of the hype – could change the world as we know it… Realistically however – and in the right circumstances – Blockchain oriented approaches to effectively dis-intermediating existing business processes … Continue reading How to deal with Blockchain in a mainframe environment.
IT departments must be able to respond to an array of requirements critical to the organisation. To be successful they are expected to leverage leading-edge IT to provide services and support their citizens, customers and business partners like never before. … Continue reading How Mainframe-as-a-Service Delivers Agility, Innovation and flexibility, while Driving Down Costs
What happens in Vegas…. Greetings from CA world in Las Vegas! In this post, I want to ensure that some things, which don’t need to stay here, don’t! I had the pleasure of watching Barry Becker (Vice President, GTS Systems Services Center of Competency at IBM) and Ashok Reddy (General Manager of the CA mainframe Business) announce a new teaming approach. They announced joint support for a series of initiatives starting in North America, focused around IBM’s “Cloud Managed Services on z Systems” (I am going to call it the “zCloud”, IBM’s strategic cloud service for the mainframe). Ashok and Barry first talked about the move … Continue reading What Happens in Vegas…
At VM Ware World mid-last year HP, VM Ware and IBM Storage got together to talk about some findings they got from internal benchmarks, the even went so far as to produce, a whitepaper was published by the VMware performance folks describing a scalability test of running multiple RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.5 virtual machines under vSphere 5.5 on a 240 core HP Superdome X. While the focus of the study, known as Project Capstone (*), was on the scalability of multiple VMs, we thought it would be interesting to compare how an IBM LinuxONE Emperor machine would perform, using a … Continue reading LinuxONE and large VM’s – a Linux Infrastructure performance perspective
Often enough, Docker is mentioned in one breath with portability. However, there are two dimensions of portability: first, running a container on any system of the same platform. Here, Docker really simplifies deploying applications on any system (of the same instruction set architecture). From a Linux on z Systems perspective, the second aspect of cross platform portability is more interesting: portability across platforms. Often enough, getting a container to run on z is not a big deal, but sometimes it is. Let’s decompose this: Start with the Docker interface: whether that refers to the CLI or REST API, it is … Continue reading A Look at Docker and Portability
Red Hat Summit was a great success with over 5,000 people attending, up from 4,300 last year. In a tough economy with strict expenses policies the norm, getting 5,000 to turn up in Boston for almost a week is no mean feat! So why the buzz? Well, Open Source is going mainstream in data centres, over the last 20 years Linux has gone from an anti-movement to Windows to in most cases the platform of choice for modern business applications. At the IBM booth at the conference it was a stream of attendees from numerous household names, yes there was the … Continue reading A busy week in Linux
So the world of Cloud Computing continues to evolve on a almost daily basis, but what specific event has forced pen to paper… or virtual pen to paper at least. Well the exit of RackSpace from the IaaS market to me was a major event in the evolution of the cloud and the commoditization of what I call the first wave of cloud, namely Simple IT-aaS. If one of the hiperscale darlings of the IaaS space can no longer make sufficient margin from this sector then what hope have tier 2 and 3 player got for local markets or specific industry … Continue reading 2nd wave of cloud…
Having been on the road for the last two weeks firstly at Interconnect in Las Vegas and then this week at SHARE in Seattle, I have spent a lot of time talking to clients, ISV’s and IBMers and I have stumbled on a catch phrase. Cloud is not a place, nor is it a technology, rather it is a consumption model… Now I know that it isn’t particularly catchy, but I hope it does impart some insight. So let me expand. Cloud is not a place, my inference here is that ‘cloud’ is neither on-premise nor off-premise. A lot of … Continue reading My new catch phrase…
Automating Workload Deployment on z Systems One of the primary benefits of adopting cloud computing is the ability to spin up a new environment – primarily for development – in an automated and rapid manner. Taking the set of usually mundane tasks – allocating network connectivity, configuring security, acquiring software licenses, etc. – and automating them with the right degree of approvals and validations. Whereas we’ve been highlighting the strengths of the mainframe in providing secure isolation/multi-tenancy, elastic scaling, chargeback, etc. that characterize cloud computing, we haven’t had the self-service portal and the installation scripts to deploy the key workloads … Continue reading Automating Workload Deployment on z Systems
Yesterday was such a packed day, ending in such an awesome evening that you are getting this post mid-morning on the 3rd day!!! The day started with a really engaged panel discussion with our Cloud experts and clients with a guest appearance by Neil Cattermull from Compare the Cloud. Then I ran to the MGM and did 2 pieces to camera for our sellers, so they can on their tablet understand the value prop for cloud on z, if your interested the 4 key themes are: TCO, Security, Availability and QoS… Then I had a meeting with the WorldWide … Continue reading Day 2 at Interconnect
