IBM is announcing the upcoming availability of new and improved "on-demand" IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE operating system instances. Here are the highlights as I see them....
IBM Wazi-as-a-Service will provide z/OS instances running on IBM Cloud. Yes, you'll be able to get your very own z/OS instance(s) within just a few minutes, as an on-demand "walk up" service, for development and testing. IBM intends to introduce this service soon, likely generally available in the second half of 2022. IBM has put (and is putting) a lot of effort into making the experience really easy for developers to consume, so the "on ramp" will be a lot gentler, too. However, you'll still be able to run customized z/OS instances if/when you want to do something "special." Importantly, although IBM Wazi-as-a-Service is not designed, intended, or licensed for uses beyond development and testing, the performance characteristics (to run compile jobs, for example) are much more consistent with real IBM Z servers than with the IBM Z Development & Test Environment (ZD&TE) or ZPDT on X86-64 servers. I'll give you one guess why that might be. :-) Preliminary test results indicate about 15X faster compilation of Java applications, 12X faster for C, and 8X faster for COBOL. For reasons of efficiency and deployability in the way we run these z/OS instances you could see some performance "oddities" if you push hard in certain ways, but the overall experience should be terrific. The Statement of Direction is available here: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/US-ENUS222-097-CA/name/US-ENUS222-097-CA.PDF Press release here: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2022-02-14-IBM-Simplifies-Modernization-of-Mission-Critical-Applications-for-Hybrid-Cloud More information here: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/MVK9YK8Q https://www.ibm.com/cloud/blog/announcements/ibm-cloud-delivers-a-new-era-of-modernization-with-ibm-z As you can see this Statement of Direction has more supplementary materials than IBM typically offers. Typically it's just the Statement. Not this time. Anticipating a few popular questions, I expect that the permitted uses will hew to ZD&TE terms, so (for example) training/education uses should be perfectly fine. (Want for example to teach a course on HLASM and have each student fire up his/her own z/OS instance? As far as I know that should be fine, but we'll see for sure when GA arrives.) No pricing has been announced yet, but a major objective is to make IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE more accessible, easier to consume, and easier to use. That also means more granular pricing, so that if you only need a little z/OS you don't have to pay for a lot. And this Statement of Direction doesn't affect the availability of ZD&TE (including the new ZD&TE Learners Edition) or ZPDT. Parallel Sysplex configurations? We hear you/let's see/may need time. IBM will also introduce LinuxONE Bare Metal Servers. IBM LinuxONE Bare Metal Servers provide customers with whole dedicated Linux LPARs on IBM Cloud, on-demand. This offering is intended for workloads that require high-performance, single-tenancy computing resources with more predictable capacity. And there are more LinuxONE server instance types coming (or even available already) with more flexibility in more locations. As always, refer to the official IBM materials for anything official. IBM's plans are subject to change. My personal views are my own. - - - - - - - - - - Timothy Sipples I.T. Architect Executive Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE - - - - - - - - - - E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
