To help enterprises incorporate mainframe computing into the cloud, CA Technologies has developed a next-generation mainframe management strategy and products.

Over the last three years, CA Technologies has introduced several mainframe products and services designed to reduce costs, sustain IT skills and increase agility.  Two developments over the last 18 months led the company to evolve its strategy even further, Dayton Semerjian, General Manager, Mainframe, told me recently. First, enterprises are quickly embracing cloud while also struggling to figure out how to adapt their current IT architectures to it. [See related article.] Second, IBM last year introduced a new hybrid platform, the zEnterprise System, that brings mainframe and distributed computing together in one box.

These trends mean that “the mainframe is becoming more integrated with [current] data centers,” according to Semerjian. “It is being blended into a multi-vendor environment.” That, in turn, will require tools and IT staff that can work across both mainframe and distributed architectures. The latest strategy aims to meet those needs.

According to David Hodgson, Senior Vice President Strategy and Product Management, Mainframe, CA Technologies, organizations  who have adopted Linux on System z, which enables enterprises to run Linux servers on the mainframe, are already  moving toward integrated environments. The Linux migration requires them to merge mainframe and distributed computing staff, he says: “It’s a microcosm of the bigger picture and a sign of what may be happening on a larger scale.”

In fact, an August 2011 CA Technologies survey of 500 CIOs and senior IT managers in Europe and North America, indicates such convergence is already under way at many enterprises. Fifty-one percent of respondents said they shared architects across mainframe and distributed platforms; 39 had common management, meaning that someone at a level below the CIO was responsible for unifying mainframe and distributed platforms; and 30 percent had a shared budget. “They are spending across platforms to meet business needs,” says Semerjian. “They are viewing it as a business spend, not a platform spend.”

To extend its strategy to further enable this convergence, the executives noted that CA Technologies will:

• Support IBM’s Z Enterprise with expanded cross-enterprise management tools. 
• Help IT organizations use their mainframes in private and hybrid clouds.
• Empower an “ambidextrous workforce” – a new generation of IT staff that can work in both mainframe and distributed computing environments.
• Extend management support to a broad, heterogeneous environment.

The company is putting action behind its words. Announcing the strategy at CA World 2011, held in November in Las Vegas, the company detailed several product and service enhancements to carry it out.  The company is opening up its Mainframe Software Manager (MSM) product, for example, to other vendors so that IT organizations that use the software will have access to even more capabilities from the common management console that MSM provides.  In addition, the company announced plans to port AppLogic, its turnkey cloud-computing platform that currently runs on distributed platforms, to the mainframe.

“AppLogic on the mainframe will enable enterprises to build a cloud that encompasses distributed and mainframe platforms and enable workloads to be shifted across these platforms,” says Hodgson.

That’s the whole idea behind cloud, after all. It shouldn’t matter where the processing is happening.  Tools that bridge the gap between mainframe and distributed computing will free enterprises to use the best platform for any particular workload, making overall IT operations more efficient and cost effective.