Dec 7 2009 2:03PM GMT

More about the mainframe and cloud computing

Mark Fontecchio Profile: Mark Fontecchio

James Governor, an analyst at Red Monk, writes about how major IT vendors are now pushing their consolidated architectures – what some might call unified computing – as great solutions for cloud computing. The only problem, Governor concludes, is that the mainframe has been doing this for decades.

Governor is not saying that the mainframe is necessarily a great cloud computing machine. In fact, he thinks that cloud computing is “definitely not a hardware story, except in as much as it fundamentally changes the way we consume system resources.” He brings this up to explain his disappointment at a recent EMC analyst event, where they were pushing the integration with CIsco and VMware as some boon to cloud computing, the foundations of which are so-called Vblocks.

But it wasn’t clear how enterprise compute purchasing is actually simplified with Vblocks. Frankly an enterprise could buy an IBM System z mainframe and it would be just like a Vblock- a fully-virtualised, pre-tested, pretested solution based on IBM software and gear. IBM doesn’t have a TotalStorage, System p and WebSphere coalition.