IBM Brings Enterprise Cloud to the Mainframe

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a series of new enterprise cloud offerings for the mainframe. These are aimed to help clients and service providers reduce the cost of operations and rapidly deploy cloud services with mainframe technology.

Today’s announcement includes the first System z-based integrated system offering, the IBM Enterprise Cloud System.

It provides an integrated platform to support mission-critical workloads. Additionally, a new flexible utility pricing model being announced today will provide service providers with the ability to pay for Linux based mainframe cloud infrastructure over time based on compute consumption, rather than system capacity.

With the ability to support up to 6,000 Virtual Machines in a single system, provide a secure multi-tenant environment and dynamically share resources across workloads, the mainframe is uniquely positioned to meet the enterprise cloud infrastructure needs of cloud service providers and dynamic private cloud deployments, says the company.

Thanks to higher system efficiency and greater scalability, IBM says, the total cost of some Linux on System z cloud deployments can by up to 55 percent less than comparable x86-based cloud infrastructure.

The new “IBM MSP Utility Pricing for System z” pricing model, delivered through IBM Global Financing, provides consumption-based pricing designed especially to make mainframe technologies more widely accessible to Managed Service Providers (MSPs).

This consumption-based approach allows an MSP to focus on building their business rather than on the cost of their infrastructure, IBM suggests.