2020 is the year, according to IDC, when combined IT infrastructure spending on private and public clouds will eclipse spending on traditional data centers. The researcher predicts the public cloud will account for 31.68 percent of IT infrastructure spending in 2020, while private clouds will take a 19.82 percent slice of the spending pie, totaling more than half (51.5 percent) of all infrastructure spending for the first time, with the rest going to traditional data centers.
Source: courtesy of IBM
There is no going back. By 2021 IDC expects the balance to continue tilting further toward the cloud, with combined public and private cloud dollars making up 53.15 percent of infrastructure spending. Enterprise spending on cloud, according to IDC, will grow over $530 billion as over 90 percent of enterprises will be using a mix of multiple cloud services and platforms, both on and off premises.
Technology customers want choices. They want to choose their access device, interface, deployment options, cost and even their speed of change. Luckily, today’s hybrid age enables choices. Hybrid clouds and multi-cloud IT offer the most efficient way of delivering the widest range of customer choices.
For Z shops, this shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. IBM has been preaching the hybrid gospel for years, at least since x86 machines began making significant inroads into its platform business. The basic message has always been the same: Center the core of your business on the mainframe and then build around it— using x86 if you must but now try LinuxONE and hybrid clouds, both public and on-premises.
For many organizations a multi-cloud strategy using two or more different clouds, public or on-premise, offers the fastest and most efficient way of delivering the maximum in choice, regardless of your particular strategy. For example one might prefer a compute cloud while the other a storage cloud. Or, an organization might use different clouds—a cloud for finance, another for R&D, and yet another for DevOps.
The reasoning behind a multi-cloud strategy can also vary. Reasons can range from risk mitigation, to the need for specialized functionality, to cost management, analytics, security, flexible access, and more.
Another reason for a hybrid cloud strategy, which should resonate with DancingDinosaur readers, is modernizing legacy systems. According to Gartner, by 2020, every dollar invested in digital business innovation will require enterprises to spend at least three times that to continuously modernize the legacy application portfolio. In the past, such legacy application portfolios have often been viewed as a problem subjected to large-scale rip-and-replace efforts in desperate, often unsuccessful attempts to salvage them.
With the growth of hybrid clouds, data center managers instead can manage their legacy portfolio as an asset by mixing and matching capabilities from various cloud offerings to execute business-driven modernization. This will typically include microservices, containers, and APIs to leverage maximum value from the legacy apps, which will no longer be an albatross but a valuable asset.
While the advent of multi-clouds or hybrid clouds may appear to complicate an already muddled situation, they actually provide more options and choices as organizations seek the best solution for their needs at their price and terms.
With the Z this may be easier done than it initially sounds. “Companies have lots of records on Z, and the way to get to these records is through APIs, particularly REST APIs,” explains Juliet Candee, IBM Systems Business Continuity Architecture. Start with the IBM Z Hybrid Cloud Architecture. Then, begin assembling catalogs of APIs and leverage z/OS Connect to access popular IBM middleware like CICS. By using z/OS Connect and APIs through microservices, you can break monolithic systems into smaller, more composable and flexible pieces that contain business functions.
Don’t forget LinuxONE, another Z but optimized for Linux and available at a lower cost. With the LinuxONE Rockhopper II, the latest slimmed down model, you can run 240 concurrent MongoDB databases executing a total of 58 billion database transactions per day on a single server. Accelerate delivery of your new applications through containers and cloud-native development tools, with up to 330,000 Docker containers on a single Rockhopper II server. Similarly, lower TCO and achieve a faster ROI with up to 65 percent cost savings over x86. And the new Rockhopper II’s industry-standard 19-inch rack uses 40 percent less space than the previous Rockhopper while delivering up to 60 percent more Linux capacity.
This results in what Candee describes as a new style of building IT that involves much smaller components, which are easier to monitor and debug. Then, connect it all to IBM Cloud on Z using secure Linux containers. This could be a hybrid cloud combining IBM Cloud Private and an assortment of public clouds along with secure zLinux containers as desired.
DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his work at technologywriter.com and here.
Please note: DancingDinosaur will be away for the first 2 weeks of July. The next piece should appear the week of July 16 unless the weather is unusually bad.
Tags: Cloud, composable systems, Docker containers, faster ROI, IBM, Linux, LinuxONE, LinuxONE Rockhopper II, lower TCO, mainframe, microservices, MongoDB, technology, zLinux containers
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