Moving your mainframe to the cloud

Posted November 2, 2011 at 3:10 pm by Eelco van Beek in Cloud Computing.

Many larger companies have their core IT platform traditionally hosted on a local mainframe platform and managed by an internal support team. At Jitscale we specialize in managing business critical platforms and revolutionizing quality of service.

Because these mainframe platforms are by definition critical to the business, computing intensive and complex they are a perfect fit for our solutions. Additionally, a lot of mainframe applications would benefit from features like on demand capacity through auto-scaling, such as doing large batch jobs for example, resulting in automatically adding even more layers of security and redundancy. Instead of being redundant in two datacenters it is possible to have redundancy over multiple continents, legislation and other regulations permitting.

So where are we right now? We’re currently researching the proper platform setup. Redundancy (especially database) is complex. We’re exploring a diversity of Cobol VM’s to see if we’re able to get the right performance data. That data is required by our Jitscale Management Layer in order to decide whether a platform should scale up, to facilitate more users, or even scale down in moments when the platform is hardly utilized therefore saving costs and energy.

It won’t be long until we can add the full support of Cobol based mainframe platforms into our Jitscale Management Layer, opening up endless possibilities into the next era of computing: ‘Computing-as-a-Service’.