ARMONK, N.Y., February 14, 2022 — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced developments to help clients accelerate transformation with capabilities designed to modernize applications across hybrid cloud environments. These include plans to deliver IBM Z as-a-service on IBM Cloud for development and test, as well as additional tools for developing hybrid applications. For the first time, developers will be able to develop and test mainframe applications as-a-service in a public cloud environment, according to the company.
An IBM Institute for Business Value study, “Application Modernization on the Mainframe,” reported that 71 percent of responding executives say mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategy. Four out of five respondents say their organizations need to rapidly transform to keep up with competition, which includes modernizing mainframe-based applications and adopting a more open approach.
“Today’s IBM is focused on helping our clients across every industry apply hybrid cloud and AI to transform the way their businesses work. IBM recognizes that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to modernization, said Tarun Chopra, Vice President, IBM Z Hybrid Cloud. “By leveraging both IBM Z and IBM Cloud, clients can benefit from a hybrid cloud approach that allows them to capitalize on the innovations, technical advancements, security, resiliency of each platform. With hybrid cloud, you keep your workloads where they need to be—in the cloud, on premises, and at the edge—to help reduce risk and improve time to market.”
Available as a closed experimental today, IBM plans to deliver IBM Wazi as-a-Service (Wazi aaS), bringing z/OS capabilities to IBM Cloud for the first time, expected to be generally available in 2H 2022, with on-demand access to z/OS, available as needed for development and test. This will provide z/OS developers with the agility of a public cloud development environment with the ability to use a variable amount of resources, and pay-as-you-go, matching burst and business demand. Consistent with the regulated workloads of many IBM Z clients today, IBM Wazi aaS will enable self-provisioning of a z/OS Virtual Server Instance on IBM Z in a logically isolated, highly-secured private space running in IBM Cloud.
With this announcement, IBM has significantly reduced the time to get access to z/OS development and test environments from days or weeks down to 5 minutes or less[1]. According to internal IBM benchmarks, z/OS development on the IBM Cloud performs up to 15x faster than comparable x86 development and test alternatives[2].
Wazi aaS is being designed to help developers:
- Increase speed and agility with on-demand access to z/OS for development and test
- Accelerate DevOps practices with predictable and flexible consumption-based pricing
- Reduce the need for specialized skills with a consistent cloud-native development experience
IBM is also working with ecosystem partners such as TCS and BMC to help IBM Z clients accelerate the modernization of their applications, data and processes in an open hybrid cloud architecture.
“We believe that IBM Wazi aaS will be a significant value add to our mainframe applications modernization solutions and services. It will accelerate speed to market for new and modernized systems and on-demand access to z/OS dev and test. Leveraging TCS’ cloud solutions and accelerators along with the security and reliability of IBM Cloud, we are helping clients accelerate their hybrid cloud modernization journeys and business transformation,” said Arun Prabhakar, VP & Global Head, Alliances, TCS.
IBM is also announcing the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack, expected to be generally available on March 15, to jumpstart or accelerate application modernization and take a standardized approach to IT automation across a variety of common use cases. This delivers the first set of capabilities in support of the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center, which was announced in December, to help clients increase agility and accelerate their transformation including support for popular open source projects.
The IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack is designed to help clients:
- Simplify access to applications and data through secure API creation and integration in minutes;
- Leverage agile enterprise DevOps for cloud native development with industry standard open tools and rapid application analysis; and
- Standardize IT automation to reduce the need for specialized skills and empower developers with access to open source environments such as Kubernetes.
For more information go to the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center.
[1] Measurements were done across two different IBM Cloud production sites using an experimental version of z/OS 2.4 stock image and a mz2o-2×16 VSI profile. Measurements were performed with Ansible automation based on the examples at https://github.com/ibm-hyper-protect/linuxone-vsi-automation-samples. Results may vary.
[2] Performance results based on IBM internal tests running application compiles on an experimental IBM Cloud z/OS V2R4 Virtual Server Instance (VSI) with profile mz2o-2×16 versus on IBM ZD&T EE V13.3 running in an IBM Cloud x86 VSI with profile mx2-2×16. IBM ZD&T was running on Ubuntu 20.4 on a x86 Production VSI with a Cascade Lake Intel Xeon Platinum CPU @ 2.4GHz. Both z/OS VSI and ZD&T were configured with 2 vCPUs, 16GB memory, and 1 TB Block storage with 10 IOPS/GB. The following applications were compiled: a Java application that processes SMF records, a C application that processes IBM Z hardware diagnostic data, a COBOL application that creates and updates records on a file, and a FORTRAN statistical application. Results may vary.
