Informed CIO: Mainframes and Virtualization
Mainframes and Virtualization: 5 Questions To Ask About Unification
Does your data center house hundreds of virtualized x86 boxes, yet you’re still maxing out on cooling capacity and space while facing increasing demand? If yours is one of the over 80% of Fortune 1,000 companies that run big iron, consider that not only do mainframes provide a rock-solid platform for virtualization, they can yield consolidation ratios that dwarf the more popular x86 virtualization path.
Today’s mainframes typically host many of the back-end systems we’ve come to take for granted over the years. The newer, sexier stuff—ERP and BI, e-commerce and Web apps, e-mail—have tended to grow in the distributed world. But when your goal is virtualization nirvana, mainframe teams are the Zen masters. They’ve been provisioning and dicing up their capacity for years, even before the rise of z/VM and Linux. In this realm, best practices around operational policies and procedures, mature capacity planning discipline, and resource allocation have matured through time, experience and necessity. So as you expand your virtualization practice within distributed systems and face the challenges around virtual server sprawl, operational control and provisioning, it just makes sense to tap mainframe knowledge and management resources. (C040509)
Table of Contents
3 Author’s Bio
4 Tech Basics
6 Bridge the Divide
7 Figure 1: Data Center Consolidation Primary Power-Saving Method
10 Figure 2: Majority Use Tools to Manage Configuration
12 Your First Mainframe: Do the Math
5 Questions to Ask:
7 1 / How can we most effectively address organizational issues?
8 2 / What’s our long-term OS outlook?
9 3 / What are our uptime requirements and options to achieve them?
10 4 / What virtualization-aware monitoring and management tools do we use?
11 5 / What are the staffing implications?
About the Author
Mike Healey is the president of Yeoman Technology Group, an engineering and research firm focusing on maximizing technology investments for organizations, and an InformationWeek Analytics contributor. He has more than 23 years experience in technology and software integration.
Prior to founding Yeoman, Mike served as the CTO of national network integrator GreenPages. He joined GreenPages as part of the acquisition of TENCorp, where he served as president for 14 years. Prior to founding TENCorp, Mike was an international project manager for Nixdorf Computer and a Notes consultant for Sandpoint Corp.
Mike has taught courses at MIT Lowell Institute and Northeastern University and has served on the Educational Board of Advisers for several schools and universities throughout New England. He has a BA in operations management from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MBA from Babson College.
He is a regular contributor for InformationWeek, focusing on the business challenges related to implementing technology. His work includes analysis of the SaaS market, green IT and operational readiness related to virtualized environments.
