IBM Celebrate Mainframe’s 50th With New Enterprise Cloud Workload

IBM has wished its mainframe computer a happy 50th birthday and as a gift loaded it up with a variety of new enterprise cloud infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] offerings that will see it live on for some time.

The firm announced the new IBM Enterprise Cloud System that provides an integrated platform built on open standards and it can allow users to create a cloud environment capable of supporting mission-critical workloads.

IBM stated that the system includes automated cloud orchestration and monitoring technology, System-z hardware, IBM storage and IBM cloud management software in one IaaS product, and it can reportedly support up to 6,000 virtual machines [VMs] in one system.

“The mainframe is uniquely positioned to meet the enterprise cloud infrastructure needs of cloud service providers and dynamic private cloud deployments,” IBM stated in a press release. “As the cloud market evolves, to service an ever-larger share and type of IT workloads, clients are increasingly turning to the mainframe to provide the basis of their cloud deployments.”

Further to this, IBM unveiled three new projects that use the mainframe’s extensive technology in order to solve a variety of vastly diverse challenges across the globe.

The first is a First of a Kind [FOAK] project that it is working with various municipalities and business partners to bring data together and help both state and local agencies migrate IT operations into the cloud using System z.

IBM Research, meanwhile, is working with healthcare scientists on two projects that are aimed at decreasing suffering among rheumatoid arthritis sufferers and stem the outbreak of HIV in Africa.

IBM Research will work with the Arthritis foundation to use the mainframe computing power to collect data and develop models that predict patients that are most likely to respond to anti-TNF therapy.

Lastly, Ghana’s government is teaming up with both IBM and Yale to use the mainframe to overcome challenges faced by researchers as it tries to eliminate mother-to-child HIV. Health workers in Ghana will use mobile devices to collect data that will be uploaded and analysed on the IBM mainframe to produce insights for treatment and prevention programs.