IBM Mainframe Forum

Hi Everyone,

I would like to get your thoughts on using mainframes for hosting or cloud computing.

My hosting company is acquiring IBM Z series mainframe and I would like to know what is the best way or should I say how can we make the most money out of it ?

Should we use it for cloud computing, hosting or something else, This mainframe was purchased originally for one of the biggest banks in our country but they somehow forgot about it at the warehouse so we bought it from their inventory.

If you can also list the associated costs of operting a Z Frame for cloud hosting.

Thanks a lot for your help, we would probably need someone to setup the architecture so I will post another topic next month about this.

Omer A.

I think this "cloud" computing stuff is a fad that is going to fade away very quickly except for a few special cases ("super computing" is one of them) that are going to be swamped in competition with little room for serious profit. This idea was championed roughly 30 years ago under a different name, and it soon crashed and burned.

That said, it currently appears that most "cloud" hosts are using some variant of Linux or Unix. Z machines run hundreds, or even thousands, of Linux instances very well, but I am by no means an expert here, and do not follow this matter very closely. Indeed, IBM currently claims that are very large percentage of new mainframe CPU time is running Linux rather than more traditional z/OS, z/VSE or z/VM workloads.

The internet as a communications backbone, coupled with running Linux instances as virtual machines is a major difference from the situation 30 years ago, and it may make "cloud" computing feasible and cast my negative thoughts into the bit bucket.