IBM has unveiled new services and capabilities for IBM Z, which, the company says, will further position it as a center point of a secured hybrid cloud strategy.
According to Ross Mauri, general manager for IBM Z, who made the announcement in an IBM Infrastructure blog post, the new offerings include three major elements. IBM sees “secured hybrid and multicloud as the future of enterprise IT, and IBM Z is at the center,” said Mauri.
The new offerings include Tailored Fit Pricing, IBM z/OS Container Extensions, and IBM z/OS Cloud Broker.
- Tailored Fit Pricing for IBM Z, a new pricing model for today’s enterprise IT environment designed to deliver the transparency and flexibility of consumption-based pricing, with economies of scale for workloads on IBM z/OS. The pricing adjusts with usage and includes “aggressive pricing” for growth. In addition, a capacity solution, which is also part of Tailored Fit Pricing, enables clients to mix and match workloads to help maximize use of the full capacity of the platform. According to Mauri, an IBM ecosystem partner, Broadcom, has also announced the availability of a consumption-based pricing model to support their workloads on the mainframe. It is intended to complement and work seamlessly with IBM's MSU-based pricing strategy. BMC and Compuware are also supportive of and offer their own open, flexible pricing models intended to provide a more seamless customer experience, he added.
- Introducing more flexibility into operations on Z, Mauri said, IBM is also rolling out IBM z/OS Container Extensions, which are engineered to modernize and extend z/OS applications. This gives customers the ability to run Linux on IBM Z Docker container in direct support of z/OS workloads on the same z/OS system. With z/OS Container Extensions, he noted, customers will be able to access new development tools and processes available in Linux on the Z ecosystem, giving developers the flexibility to build cloud-native containerized apps and deploy them on z/OS without requiring Linux or a Linux partition.
- And finally, Mauri said, IBM is also introducing IBM z/OS Cloud Broker, which gives users the ability to access and deploy z/OS resources and services on IBM Cloud Private, and to help them achieve a universal cloud development experience. IBM z/OS Cloud Broker is intended to provide a single control plane across z/OS, Linux on Z, Power, and public cloud, and enable application developers can provision and de-provision z/OS environments to support the app development cycle.
The new offerings, when combined with the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect line of cloud-native services, can provide enterprise developers with access to security and resiliency to modernize their applications, Mauri said. Hyper Protect offers on-premise and off-premise deployment for extending IBM Z services and data. Next month, Mauri said, IBM is also launching Hyper Protect Database as a Service (DBaaS) which will support cloud-native developers by providing both PostgreSQL and MongoDB Enterprise Advanced database choices.