z System-Power-Storage Still Live at IBM

A mid-December briefing by Tom Rosamilia, SVP, IBM Systems, reassured some that IBM wasn’t putting its systems and platforms on the backburner after racking up financial quarterly losses for years. Expect new IBM systems in 2017. A few days later IBM announced that Japan-based APLUS Co., Ltd., which operates credit card and settlement service businesses, selected IBM LinuxONE as its mission-critical system for credit card payment processing. Hooray!

LinuxONE’s security and industry-leading performance will ensure APLUS achieves its operational objectives as online commerce heats up and companies rely on cloud applications to draw and retain customers. Especially in Japan, where online and mobile shopping has become increasingly popular, the use of credit cards has grown, with more than 66 percent of consumers choosing that method for conducting online transactions. And with 80 percent enterprise hybrid cloud adoption predicted by 2017, APLUS is well positioned to connect cloud transactions leveraging LinuxONE. Throw in IBM’s expansion of blockchain capabilities and the APLUS move looks even smarter.

With the growth of international visitors spending money, IBM notes, and the emergence of FinTech firms in Japan have led to a diversification of payment methods the local financial industry struggles to respond. APLUS, which issues well-known credit cards such as T Card Plus, plans to offer leading-edge financial services by merging groups to achieve lean operations and improved productivity and efficiency. Choosing to update its credit card payment system with LinuxONE infrastructure, APLUS will benefit from an advanced IT environment to support its business growth by helping provide near-constant uptime. In addition to updating its server architecture, APLUS has deployed IBM storage to manage mission-critical data, the IBM DS8880 mainframe-attached storage that delivers integration with IBM z Systems and LinuxONE environments.

LinuxONE, however, was one part of the IBM Systems story Rosamilia set out to tell.  There also is the z13s, for encrypted hybrid clouds and the z/OS platform for Apache Spark data analytics and even more secure cloud services via blockchain on LinuxONE, by way of Bluemix or on premises.

z/OS will get attention in 2017 too. “z/OS is the best damn OLTP system in the world,” declared Rosamilia. He went on to imply that enhancements and upgrades to key z systems were coming in 2017, especially CICS, IMS, and a new release of DB2. Watch for new announcements coming soon as IBM tries to push z platform performance and capacity for z/OS and OLTP.

Rosamilia also talked up the POWER story. Specifically, Google and Rackspace have been developing OpenPOWER systems for the Open Compute Project.  New POWER LC servers running POWER8 and the NVIDIA NVLink accelerator, more innovations through the OpenCAPI Consortium, and the team of IBM and Nvidia to deliver PowerAI, part of IBM’s cognitive efforts.

As much as Rosamilia may have wanted to talk about platforms and systems IBM continues to avoid using terms like systems and platforms. So Rosamilia’s real intent was to discuss z and Power in conjunction with IBM’s strategic initiatives.  Remember these: cloud, big data, mobile, analytics. Lately, it seems, those initiatives have been culled down to cloud, hybrid cloud, and cognitive systems.

IBM’s current message is that IT innovation no longer comes from just the processor. Instead, it comes through scaling performance by workload and sustaining leadership through ecosystem partnerships.  We’ve already seen some of the fruits of that innovation through the Power community. Would be nice to see some of that coming to the z too, maybe through the open mainframe project. But that isn’t about z/0S. Any boost in CICS, DB2, and IMS will have to come from the core z team. The open mainframe project is about Linux on z.

The first glimpse we had of this came last spring in a system dubbed Minsky, which was described back then by commentator Timothy Prickett Morgan. With the Minsky machine, IBM is using NVLink ports on the updated Power8 CPU, which was shown in April at the OpenPower Summit and is making its debut in systems actually manufactured by ODM Wistron and rebadged, sold, and supported by IBM. The NVLink ports are bundled up in a quad to deliver 80 GB/sec bandwidth between a pair of GPUs and between each GPU and the updated Power8 CPU.

The IBM version, Morgan describes, aims to create a very brawny node with very tight coupling of GPUs and CPUs so they can better share memory, have fewer overall GPUs, and more bandwidth between the compute elements. IBM is aiming Minsky at HPC workloads, according to Morgan, but there is no reason it cannot be used for deep learning or even accelerated databases.

Is this where today’s z data center managers want to go?  No one is likely to spurn more performance, especially if it is accompanied with a price/performance improvement.  Whether rank-and-file z data centers are queueing up for AI or cognitive workloads will have to be seen. The sheer volume and scale of expected activity, however, will require some form of automated intelligent assist.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here

Meet the POWER9 Chip Family

When you looked at a chip in the past you primarily were concerned with two things: the speed of the chip, usually expressed in GHz, and how much power it consumed. Today the IBM engineers preparing the newest POWER chip, the 14nm POWER9, are tweaking the chips for the different workloads it might run, such as cognitive or cloud, and different deployment options, such as scale-up or scale-out, and a host of other attributes.  EE Times described it in late August from the Hot Chips conference where it was publicly unveiled.

IBM POWER9 chip

IBM describes it as a chip family but maybe it’s best described as the product of an entire chip community, the Open POWER Foundation. Innovations include CAPI 2.0, New CAPI, Nvidia’s NVLink 2.0, PCle Gen4, and more. It spans a range of acceleration options from HSDC clusters to extreme virtualization capabilities for the cloud. POWER9 is not just about high speed transaction processing; IBM wants the chip to interpret and reason, ingest and analyze.

POWER has gone far beyond the POWER chips that enabled Watson to (barely) beat the human Jeopardy champions. Going forward, IBM is counting on POWER9 and Watson to excel at cognitive computing, a combination of high speed analytics and self-learning. POWER9 systems should not only be lightning fast but get smarter with each new transaction.

For z System shops, POWER9 offers a glimpse into the design thinking IBM might follow with the next mainframe, probably the z14 that will need comparable performance and flexibility. IBM already has set up the Open Mainframe Project, which hasn’t delivered much yet but is still young. It took the Open POWER group a couple of years to deliver meaningful innovations. Stay tuned.

The POWER9 chip is incredibly dense (below). You can deploy it as either a scale-up or scale-out architecture. You have a choice of two-socket servers with 8 DDR4 ports and another for multiple chips per server with buffered DIMMs.

IBM POWER9 silicon layout

IBM describes the POWER9 as a premier acceleration platform. That means it offers extreme processor/accelerator bandwidth and reduced latency; coherent memory and virtual addressing capability for all accelerators; and robust accelerated compute options through the OpenPOWER community.

It includes State-of-the-Art I/O and Acceleration Attachment Signaling:

• PCIe Gen 4 x 48 lanes – 192 GB/s duplex bandwidth
• 25G Link x 48 lanes – 300 GB/s duplex bandwidth

And robust accelerated compute options based on open standards, including:

• On-Chip Acceleration—Gzip x1, 842 Compression x2, AES/SHA x2
• CAPI 2.0—4x bandwidth of POWER8 using PCIe Gen 4
• NVLink 2.0—next generation of GPU/CPU bandwidth and integration using 25G Link
• New CAPI—high bandwidth, low latency and open interface using 25G Link

In scale-out mode it employs direct attached memory through 8 direct DDR4 ports, which deliver:

• Up to 120 GB/s of sustained bandwidth
• Low latency access
• Commodity packaging form factor
• Adaptive 64B / 128B reads

In scale-up mode it uses buffered memory through 8 buffered channels to provide:

• Up to 230GB/s of sustained bandwidth
• Extreme capacity – up to 8TB / socket
• Superior RAS with chip kill and lane sparing
• Compatible with POWER8 system memory
• Agnostic interface for alternate memory innovations

POWER9 was publicly introduced at the Hot Chips conference last spring. Commentators writing in EE Times noted that POWER9 could become a break out chip, seeding new OEM and accelerator partners and rejuvenating IBM’s efforts against Intel in high-end servers. To achieve that kind of performance IBM deploys large chunks of memory—including a 120 Mbyte embedded DRAM in shared L3 cache while riding a 7 Tbit/second on-chip fabric. POWER9 should deliver as much as 2x the performance of the Power8 or more when the new chip arrives next year, according to Brian Thompto, a lead architect for the chip, in published reports.

As noted above, IBM will release four versions of POWER9. Two will use eight threads per core and 12 cores per chip geared for IBM’s Power virtualization environment; two will use four threads per core and 24 cores/chip targeting Linux. Both will come in two versions — one for two-socket servers with 8 DDR4 ports and another for multiple chips per server with buffered DIMMs.

The diversity of choices, according to Hot Chips observers, could help attract OEMs. IBM has been trying to encourage others to build POWER systems through its OpenPOWER group that now sports more than 200 members. So far, it’s gaining most interest from China where one partner plans to make its own POWER chips. The use of standard DDR4 DIMMs on some parts will lower barriers for OEMs by enabling commodity packaging and lower costs.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst and writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

 

 

IBM zSystem and Power Score in IDC 4Q 2015 Rankings

IBM retained the number 3 spot with 14.1% share for the quarter as revenue increased 8.9% year-over-year to $2.2 billion in 4Q15. More impressively, IBM experienced strong growth for POWER Systems and double-digit growth for its z System mainframes in the quarter, according to IDC. You can check out the IDC announcement here. IDC credits z and POWER for IBM’s strong platform finish in 2015.

zSystem-based LinuxONE

DancingDinosaur has expected these results and been reporting IBM’s z System and POWER System successes for the past year. You can check it out here (z13s) and here (LinuxOne) and here (Power Systems LC).

Along with deservedly crowing about its latest IDC ranking IBM added:  z Systems saw double digit growth due to a number of new portfolio enhancements. The next-generation z13 mainframe, optimized for digital businesses and hybrid cloud environments, is designed to handle mobile transactions securely and at scale, while enabling clients to run analytics on the system and in real time. IBM expanded its commitment to offering open-source on the mainframe by launching a line of Linux-only systems in August of 2015. LinuxONE is based on the latest generation of z Systems technology and enables popular open-source tools and software on the mainframe. IBM also added what amounts to a Business Class z with the z13s to go along with a Business Class dedicated Linux z, the LinuxONE Rockhopper.

Meanwhile, IBM has started to get some uptake for its Open Mainframe Project. In addition to announcing support from the usual mainframe suspects—IBM, CA, Compuware, SUSE, BMC, and others—it also announced its first projects. These include an effort to find ways to leverage new software and tools in the Linux environment that can better take advantage of the mainframe’s speed, security, scalability, and availability. DancingDinosaur is hoping that in time the Open Mainframe Project will produce the kind of results the Open POWER Foundation has recently generated for the POWER Platform

IBM attributes the growing traction of Linux running on POWER Systems in large part to optimized solutions such as DB2 BLU, SAP HANA, and other industry big data software, built on POWER Systems running Linux. In October 2015, IBM expanded its Linux on Power Systems portfolio with the LC line of servers. These servers are infused with OpenPOWER Foundation technology and bring the higher performance of the POWER CPU to the broad Linux community. The POWER-based LC line along with the z-based LinuxONE Rockhopper should give any data center manager looking to run a large, efficient Linux server farm a highly cost-competitive option that can rival or even beat the x86 option. And given that both platforms will handle Docker containers and microservices and support all of today’s popular development tools there is no reason to stick with x86.

From a platform standpoint, IBM appears to be in sync with what IDC is reporting: Datacenter buildout continues, and the main beneficiary this quarter is the density-optimized segment of the market, where growth easily outpaced the overall server market. Density-optimized servers achieved a 30.2% revenue growth rate this quarter, contributing a full 2 percentage points to the overall 5.2% revenue growth in the market.

“The fourth quarter (of 2015) was a solid close to a strong year of growth in the server market, driven by on premise refresh deployments as well as continued hyperscale cloud deployments,” said Kuba Stolarski, Research Director, Servers and Emerging Technologies at IDC. “As the cyclical refresh of 2015 comes to an end, the market focus has begun to shift towards software-defined infrastructure and hybrid environment management, as organizations begin to transform their IT infrastructure as well as prepare for the compute demands expected over the next few years from next-gen IT domains such as IoT and cognitive analytics. In the short term, 2016 looks to be a year of accelerated cloud infrastructure expansion with existing footprints filling out and new cloud datacenter buildouts across the globe.”

After a seemingly endless string of dismal quarters DancingDinosaur is encouraged by what IBM is doing now with the z, POWER Systems, and its strategic initiatives. With its strategic focus on cloud, mobile, big data analytics, cognitive computing, and IoT as well as its support for the latest approaches to software development, tools, and languages, IBM should be well positioned to continue its platform success in 2016.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst and writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

Exploiting the IBM z13 for Maximum Price/Performance Advantage

The z13 is the most powerful general purpose computer IBM has ever made. The key to capturing the maximum value from the z13, however, lies in how you plan, design, configure, and optimize your systems and software for everything from COBOL and Java to process parallelization and analytics. What you do in this regard will have significant impact on not only the price/performance you experience but on your success at achieving the business outcomes you are expecting.

IBM System z13

This really becomes a software configuration challenge. By tapping approximately 600 internal processors IBM already has optimized the hardware, input, output, memory, and networking/communications about as much as it can be. Your job is to optimize the software you are running, which will require working closely with your ISV.

The place to start is by leveraging the z13’s new compiler technology, parallelism, zIIP and assist processors. This will enable you to save significant money while boosting workload performance. You will literally be doing more for less.

Similarly, in the not too distant past Moore’s Law would virtually guarantee a 15-20% price/performance gain automatically just by taking a new machine out of the box and plugging it in. That’s no longer the case. Now you will have to partner with your ISV to exploit advanced software to maximize the hardware payback and continue the ride along the favorable Moore’s Law price/performance slope.

Then look at the latest COBOL V5.x and its compiler on the z13. Out of the box it is better optimized than previous compilers. In general, the strategic value of COBOL V5.x comes from migrating high CPU usage programs as quickly as possible, effectively saving organizations considerable money by running optimized code.

Some organizations report a 15% on average reduction of CPU time, which adds up to significant savings in monthly CPU charges. How significant? Up to $150k less on a $1 million bill, with some reporting even higher percentage reductions producing even greater savings. Just migrate to COBOL V5.2 (or at least V5.1) to achieve the savings. In general, staying on the software curve with the latest releases of the OS, languages, and compilers with applications optimized for them is the best way to ensure your workloads are achieving top performance in the most cost-effective way.

For example, the new z13 processor leverages a new Vector Facility for certain COBOL statements and expands the use of Decimal Floating Point Facility for packed decimal calculations. Well-structured, compute-intensive batch applications running on z13 and compiled with the Enterprise COBOL V5.2  compiler have shown CPU reduction usage of up to 14% over the same applications running on zEC12 (compiled with the GA release of Enterprise COBOL V5.1), according to IBM. The result: improved workload price/performance.

Enterprise COBOL V5.2 also includes new features to improve programmability, developer productivity, and application modernization. Supporting JSON, for instance, will provide mobile applications easy access to data and the processing they need from business critical production applications written in COBOL.

The z13 and its z sister, the latest LinuxONE dedicated Linux models, were designed and optimized from the start for cloud, mobile, and analytics. They were intended to run alongside traditional mainframe workloads with z/OS or Linux running on the appropriate models.

Finally, plan to take advantage of the new assist processors and expanded memory capacity to further boost performance and lower cost. With the z13, there is a mandatory migration of all zAAP-enabled applications to zIIP. Expect the usage of the zIIP assist processors to surge when all those Java applications move from the zAAP.  ISVs like Compuware should be able to help with this.  In addition, if you enable SMT on the z13, you’ll immediately get more Java capacity.  Applications that run under IBM WebSphere (WAS) on z/OS will benefit too.

The z13 and especially the LinuxONE are breaking new ground. IBM has established, in conjunction with the Linux Foundation, an Open Mainframe Project to support and advance ongoing open source Linux innovation on the mainframe. IBM also is breaking with its traditional mainframe pricing model by offering a pay-per-use option in the form of a fixed monthly payment with costs scaling up or down based on usage. It also offers per-core pricing with software licenses for designated cores. See DancingDinosaur here.

An upcoming DancingDinosaur will look at more of the enhancements being added to these machines, including some of the latest LinuxOne enhancements like support for Google’s Go language and Cloudant’s NoSQL services. The message: the new z System can take you to the places you will want to be in this emerging cloud-mobile-analytics era.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst and writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

 

IBM Systems Sets 2016 Priorities

Despite its corporate struggles, IBM Systems, the organization that replaced IBM System and Technology Group (IBM STG) had a pretty good year in 2015. It started the year by launching the z13, which was optimized for the cloud and mobile economy. No surprise there. IBM made no secret that cloud, mobile, and analytics were its big priorities.  Over the year it also added cognitive computing and software defined storage to its priorities.

But it might have left out its biggest achievement of 2015.  This week IBM announced receiving a major multi-year research grant to IBM scientists to advance the building blocks for a universal quantum computer. The award was made by the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) program. This may not come to commercial fruition in our working lives but it has the potential to radically change computing as we have ever envisioned it. And it certainly will put a different spin on worries about Moore’s Law.

Right now, according to IBM, the workhorse of the quantum computer is the quantum bit (qubit). Many scientists are tackling the challenge of building qubits, but quantum information is extremely fragile and requires special techniques to preserve the quantum state. This fragility of qubits played a key part in one of the preposterous but exciting plots on the TV show Scorpion. The major hurdles include creating qubits of high quality and packaging them together in a scalable form so they can perform complex calculations in a controllable way – limiting the errors that can result from heat and electromagnetic radiation.

IBM scientists made a great stride in that direction earlier this year by demonstrating critical breakthroughs to detect quantum errors by combining superconducting qubits in lattices on computer chips – and whose quantum circuit design is the only physical architecture that can scale to larger dimensions.

To return to a more mundane subject, revenue, during 2015 DancingDinosaur reported the positive contributions the z System made to IBM’s revenue, one of the company’s few positive revenue performers. Turned out DancingDinosaur missed one contributor since it doesn’t track constant currency. If you look at constant currency, which smooths out fluctuations in currency valuations, IBM Power Systems have been on an upswing for the last 3 quarters: up 1% in Q1, up 5% in Q2, up 2% in Q3.   DancingDinosaur expects both z and Power to contribute to IBM revenue in upcoming quarters.

Looking ahead to 2016, IBM identified the following priorities:

• Develop an API ecosystem that monetizes big data and cognitive workloads, built on the cloud as part of becoming a better service provider.
• Win the architectural battle with OpenPOWER and POWER8 – designed for data and the cognitive era. (Unspoken, beat x86.)
• Extend z Systems for new mobile, cloud and in-line analytics workloads.
• Capture new developers, markets and buyers with open innovation on IBM LinuxONE, the most advanced and trusted enterprise Linux system.
• Shift the IBM storage portfolio to a Flash and the software defined model that disrupts the industry by enabling new workloads, very high speed, and data virtualization for improved data economics.
• Engage clients through a digital-first Go-to-Market model

These are all well and good. About the only thing missing is any mention of the IBM Open Mainframe Project that was announced in August as a partnership with the Linux Foundation. Still hoping that will generate the kind of results in terms of innovative products for the z that the OpenPOWER initiative has started to produce. DancingDinosaur covered that announcement here. Hope they haven’t given up already.  Just have to remind myself to be patient; it took about a year to start getting tangible results from OpenPOWER consortium.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst and writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.

Expect this to be the final DancingDinosaur for 2015.  Be back the week of Jan. 4

IBM LinuxONE and Open Mainframe Project Expand the z System

Meet the new IBM z System; called LinuxONE Emperor (named after the Emperor Penguin.) It is a z13 running only Linux. Check out the full announcement here.

Courtesy of IBM, LinuxONE Emperor, the newest z System

DancingDinosaur is excited by several aspects of this announcement:  IBM is establishing, in conjunction with the Linux Foundation, an Open Mainframe Project; the company is breaking with its traditional mainframe pricing model; it also is putting KVM and Ubuntu on the machine; and it is offering a smorgasbord of app-dev options, including some of the sexiest in the industry today. DancingDinosaur never believed it would refer to a mainframe as sexy (must be time to retire).

Along with LinuxONE Emperor IBM announced an entry dedicated Linux machine, the LinuxONE Rockhopper. (BTW; notice the new playfulness in IBM’s product naming.) Rockhopper appears to be very similar to what IBM used to call a Business Class z, although IBM has stepped away from that designation. The closest you may get to a z13 business class machine may be LinuxONE Rockhopper. Rockhopper, according to IBM, is designed for clients and emerging markets seeking the speed, security and availability of the mainframe but in a smaller package.

The biggest long term potential impact from the announcement may come out of the Open Mainframe Project. Like many of IBM’s community project initiatives, IBM is starting by seeding the open community with z code, in effect creating the beginning of an open z System machine.  IBM describes this as the largest single contribution of mainframe code from IBM to the open source community. A key part of the mainframe code contributions will be the z’s IT predictive analytics that constantly monitor for unusual system behavior and help prevent issues from turning into failures. In effect, IBM is handing over zAware to the open source community. It had already announced intentions to port zAware to Linux on z early this year so it might as well make it fully open. The code, notes IBM, can be used by developers to build similar sense-and-respond resiliency capabilities for other systems.

The Open Mainframe Project, being formed with the Linux Foundation, will involve a collaboration of nearly a dozen organizations across academia, government, and corporate sectors to advance development and adoption of Linux on the mainframe. It appears that most of the big mainframe ISVs have already signed on. DancingDinosaur, however, expressed concern that this approach brings the possibility of branching the underlying functionality between z and Linux versions. IBM insists that won’t happen since the innovations would be implemented at the software level, safely insulated from the hardware. And furthermore, should there emerge an innovation that makes sense for the z System, maybe some innovation around the zAware capabilities, the company is prepared to bring it back to the core z.

The newly announced pricing should also present an interesting opportunity for shops running Linux on z.  As IBM notes: new financing models for the LinuxONE portfolio provide flexibility in pricing and resources that allow enterprises to pay for what they use and scale up quickly when their business grows. Specifically, for IBM hardware and software, the company is offering a pay-per-use option in the form of a fixed monthly payment with costs scaling up or down based on usage. It also offers per-core pricing with software licenses for designated cores. In that case you can order what you need and decrease licenses or cancel on 30 days notice. Or, you can rent a LinuxONE machine monthly with no upfront payment.  At the end of the 36-month rental (can return the hardware after 1 year) you choose to return, buy, or replace. Having spent hours attending mainframe pricing sessions at numerous IBM conferences this seems refreshingly straightforward. IBM has not yet provided any prices to analysts so whether this actually is a bargain remains to be seen. But at least you have pricing option flexibility you never had before.

The introduction of support for both KVM and Ubuntu on the z platform opens intriguing possibilities.  Full disclosure: DancingDinosaur was an early Fedora adopter because he could get it to run on a memory-challenged antiquated laptop. With the LinuxONE announcement Ubuntu has been elevated to a fully z-supported Linux distribution. Together IBM and Canonical are bringing a distribution of Linux incorporating Ubuntu’s scale-out and cloud expertise on the IBM z Systems platform, further expanding the reach of both. Ubuntu combined with KVM should make either LinuxONE machine very attractive for OpenStack-based hybrid cloud computing that may involve thousands of VMs. Depending on how IBM ultimately prices things, this could turn into an unexpected bargain for Linux on z data centers that want to save money by consolidating x86 Linux servers, thereby reducing the data center footprint and cutting energy costs.  LinuxONE Emperor can handle 8000 virtual servers in a single system, tens of thousands of containers.

Finally, LinuxONE can run the sexiest app-dev tools using any of the hottest open technologies, specifically:

• Distributions: Red Hat, SuSE and Ubuntu
• Hypervisors: PR/SM, z/VM, and KVM
• Languages: Python, Perl, Ruby, Rails, Erlang, Java, Node.js
• Management: WAVE, IBM Cloud Manager, Urban Code Openstack, Docker, Chef, Puppet, VMware vRealize Automation
• Database: Oracle, DB2LUW, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL
• Analytics: Hadoop, Big Insights, DB2BLU and Spark

And run the results however you want: single platform, multi-platform, on-prem and off-prem, or multiple mixed cloud environments with a common toolset. Could a combination of LinuxONE alongside a conventional z13 be the mainframe data center you really want going forward?

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran IT analyst and writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.