When you closely examine many of the significant trends driving IT today, you can see why it is critical for many enterprises to choose a platform that supports open systems architecture. Now, more than ever, applications must run across the enterprise, sharing information, sharing resources and delivering new levels of business responsiveness and agility.
The growing proliferation of virtualization, cloud computing and the sharing of systems resources across enterprises means companies embracing an open systems approach have a much better opportunity to maximize their technology investment, optimize resources and eliminate silos that isolate resources and information.
Which is to say, in a way, that everything old is new again. In this case, the open systems approach embraced by IBM dating all the way back to its support of Linux at the end of the last century, is giving enterprises an opportunity to achieve all of the benefits of an open systems approach through the most reliable, secure, robust and powerful platform in the world – the mainframe.
Vendors that only sell distributed systems have worked for years to perpetuate the myth of the mainframe as a closed system requiring an archaic skill set. In today’s world of open systems and increased virtualization this myth is just the opposite of reality. In fact, those companies running Linux on VMware may be the ones perpetuating a more limited environment, in this case the x86 platform.
The IBM System z mainframe, by contrast, is open and inclusive. IBM System z servers support multiple operating systems such as z/OS, z/VSE, zTPF, Linux on System z and the z/VM and KVM hypervisors.
A big advantage of this open systems approach – as opposed to the typical VMware-on-Linux strategy – is that the IT department can much more effectively match the technology solution to the workload requirement.
You want to be able to choose the platform, or the combination of platforms, that best serve the need of the application. And now, with IBM Z, you have that open environment in a platform that will ensure maximum performance, QoS, security, reliability and robustness. As one of our Vicom Infinity customers likes to say, “We have achieved Nirvana.”
