Better together: Systems of innovation (Part three)
Welcome to the era of rapid digital business innovation, where creating new value for your organization is limited only by your imagination. Working with executive leaders, we’ve envisioned a hybrid cloud architecture that’s enterprise strong and adaptive to industry-domain requirements, by design. It’s a forward-looking platform that will stand the test of time.
Based upon our client’s IT infrastructure priorities, we know there is growing demand for an industrialized hybrid cloud platform that’s purpose-built for high-volume enterprise transaction workloads. Why does this matter? Competitive advantage is enabled by strategic foresight.
If we make a comparison to the way that market leaders foresaw how the internet would become a foundation for the global networked economy, today’s savvy IT and business leaders might apply the same predictive instinct to base platform investment decisions on emerging applications and explosive digital services growth. Are you prepared for the cognitive era of digital commerce?
Hybrid choice: Mainframe platforms
Clearly, the question isn’t whether to use cloud services, but rather it’s how to leverage them effectively to meet your most demanding business requirements. Given that security, availability and scalability are likely to be top-of-mind concerns, the IBM z Systems mainframe offers a proven and predictable hybrid cloud solution.
Hybrid cloud on z Systems supports a singular configuration that’s designed to reduce costs, cycle times, complexity and risk. You can realize all the benefits of heritage z/OS based applications, combined with open source software solutions, by deploying a robust cloud service environment using the KVM or the IBM z/VM hypervisor.
Utilizing a solution with support for more virtual servers than any other platform in a single footprint, you can implement a superior hybrid cloud strategy; starting with your existing mainframe server — exploiting the exceptional transaction processing, extremely high system uptime, industry-leading data security and peerless scale.
Advantages of Linux on z Systems
Linux OS on IBM z Systems provides a highly scalable cloud infrastructure that can assist with open standards and access to the API economy, thereby allowing you to securely connect your application services across systems, mobile devices and other cloud platforms.
Enabled by APIs, existing business functions can be used in new ways, delivered through cloud services into next generation applications. The support of standards, such as web services and REST with JSON, makes it easier for your development teams to build these new applications.
And as for agility, utilizing microservices can offer you the ability to implement independently deployable units of new code. You can get started today, and learn how z Systems Developer Community members are applying new languages to code their applications.
In addition, there’s a growing broader ecosystem to assist your efforts. That includes the z Systems Community and the IBM Cloud Marketplace. Numerous enterprise software vendors are supporting Linux on IBM z Systems, such as SAP and Oracle, as well as an established and growing ecosystem of open source software such as Docker, Go, Chef, Puppet, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Apache Spark and Node.js.
When your team is running these solutions as cloud services on Linux — integrated with existing apps on z/OS and/or z/VSE running on the same z Systems server – they’ll all gain from the collocation of data and applications and very fast internal network communication, plus an all-encompassing high availability and disaster recovery solution.
Systems of innovation in action
In the next part of this editorial series, I’ll explain how today’s modern mainframe platforms actively support virtualizing your IT environment. As you’ll see, it’s a proven way to establish a more responsive platform for collocating the diversity of essential digital business applications. Meanwhile, I invite you to learn more now, and discover the possibilities.
IBM z Systems deliver high availability and superior performance with the best protection, lowest security risk and most complete and integrated architectural and development lifecycles for the best possible hybrid cloud solution and the fastest path to business value.
Read parts one and two of this series here and here.
The post Better together: Systems of innovation (Part three) appeared first on IBM Systems Blog: In the Making.