Flex IBM Mainframe Emulators In The Cloud
We offer three alternatives for users who are running Flex IBM mainframe emulators. These systems may provide as little as 8 MIPS, but some have performance above 40 MIPS, overlapping the entry level of the IBM 7060 Multiprise 3000 range. Often, customer installed Flex systems to run workloads that were once within the span of IBM's mainframes but which grew too slowly (or didn't grow at all) while IBM mainframes became significantly more powerful.
A common reason for the retention of Flex systems is a persistent stub of old workloads that have mainly been migrated to other platforms, such as the IBM i, Windows, Linux or another Unix variant. As these systems leave center stage, the cost of running, housing and maintaining the machines may become disproportionally large. That's where out alternatives come in.
Your Machine In Our House We install your system in our data center. We provide superior digital data connectivity, excellent power grid connections (with battery backup and our own generator), and terrific physical security. You have full remote access to your system and, if you wish to run hands on from time to time, physical access, too. So, while you will be part of the cloud computing era, your actual experience will often be indistinguishable from the way your work now with systems in your own glass house. We know these systems well, and we can provide first class support and maintenance. We maintain an inventory of key Flex components such as channel cards and processor motherboards. This makes our service offering not only more economical than the maintenance plan you now have, it also makes our response to a hardware issue almost immediate. While Flex systems include their own RAID arrays and Faketape virtual tape technology, your Flex system may be at the tail end of its design life. We can tie your Flex to our newer RAID disk arrays and high performance virtual tape solutions. (We have physical tape, too, in case you want some actual cartridges.) All the extras, such as offsite backup archives, are always available.
Your Machine In Our Machine If your workloads are modest or intermittent, it may be more economical to move your environments to one or more LPARs on one of our IBM mainframe servers, even if that means moving on from the software licensing schemes available for Flex processors. Your storage will be on our RAID arrays and your backup on one of our virtual tape systems. Your work, your software and your data are isolated and protected by IBM's LPAR mechanism and secure software technologies. If you need more than one environment, for instance to separate production and development, that's easy. You'll work from terminals that use the TN3270 communications scheme, which means you will see screens that look just like the ones you see now when your system is local. We'll probably be able to give you faster computer response than you ever had on the old system. You'll like our systems personnel and operators. They really know their stuff and they'll very quickly learn your stuff, too.
Your Environment When You Need It For users licensed under ESL, we have a very practical solution for clients who only need to have a live system from time to time. We freeze-dry a complete instance of your Flex-based system and store it in our virtual tape arrays. When you need access, whether it's monthly, quarterly, yearly or anytime on demand, we install it on a mainframe with plenty of capacity or, if necessary, on one of our own Flex systems. You'll know it works because your people and our people will have set up and run your environment before freezing it. And of course we will unfreeze it for you and let your run jobs during your first full testing cycle.
