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A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By IBM

Private Clouds Will Use Hybrid Infrastructure

The Role Of Mainframes In Cloud: To Meet The Full Range Of Reliability And Security Needs

January 2013



Forrester Consulting


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Table Of Contents

Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Current State: Cloud Computing Is Taking Flight Within Enterprises ........................................................................................ 3 Challenge: Enterprise Workloads Raise New Requirements........................................................................................................... 5 Solution: Hybrid Architectures For Enterprise Clouds .................................................................................................................. 10 Key Recommendations ......................................................................................................................................................................... 16 Appendix A: Methodology................................................................................................................................................................... 17 Appendix B: Endnotes .......................................................................................................................................................................... 17

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Private clouds can (and

must) offer multipleinfrastructure service

types to satisfy the broadrange of needs in the

typical enterprise.

Executive Summary

Does your private cloud strategy aspire to merely accommodate lightweight, low-priority applications running on

commodity servers or to handle all kinds of workloads? In October 2012, IBM

commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate enterprise demand for cloud

environments for business and mission-critical enterprise workloads to determine

whether flat commodity infrastructures suffice. Forrester’s hypothesis: Emerging

requirements for cloud environments include specific infrastructure and

heightened security, reliability, and resiliency characteristics. We crafted survey

questions to test this hypothesis and fielded them to 200 IT decision-makers in

organizations with at least 500 employees in North America, the UK, Germany, and Brazil.

The survey reveals that enterprises want private clouds to accommodate a wide set of applications that in many cases

demand specialized hardware, high security, highly resilient infrastructure, and other capabilities that cannot be fully

provided by commodity infrastructure alone. In response to these requirements, private clouds can (and must) employ

hybrid infrastructure service types to satisfy the broad range of needs in the typical enterprise.

These “hybrid infrastructures” won’t simply relabel today’s complex, incompatible mess of infrastructure — private

clouds abstract workload (like business applications) complexity from the underlying infrastructure. Clouds deliver

infrastructure services — not just the raw infrastructure itself, meaning that you can deploy workloads anywhere within

the infrastructure service. Hybrid cloud infrastructures aren’t mere theory; public IaaS clouds are doing exactly that

today.1

Key FindingsForrester’s study yielded three key findings:

• The next generation of applications moving to the cloud has specialized needs. The second generation of

cloud applications is more business- and mission critical, with specific security, performance, and reliability

needs that commodity infrastructure cannot easily accommodate.2 Forrester found that enterprises have a strong

desire for their cloud environments to provide access to specialized infrastructure services to accommodate a

broader set of applications and needs.

• Cloud customers want greater infrastructure choice and are open to hybrid infrastructures. Enterprise

customers want to bring a wide set of applications, many with specialized requirements, to the cloud. Moreover,

enterprise IT decision-makers are open to these hybrid environments incorporating mainframes — as long as the

mix of infrastructure is hidden behind abstract services. The survey shows a significant bias against clouds based

on any single platform.

• Clouds using hybrid infrastructures are inevitable — particularly for private environments. While cloudsbased on commodity infrastructures are continuously improving their performance, they still lack the ability to

cost-effectively meet specialized needs that unique infrastructures can deliver. For example, mainframes can

deliver strong infrastructure resource resiliency, a more secure form of workload isolation than commodity

multitenancy approaches, and stronger resource commitment guarantees. They can also deliver these higher

values with high compute density, yielding strong cost efficiency for applicable workloads.





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Current State: Cloud Computing Is Taking Flight Within Enterprises

It should come as no surprise that enterprises are investing in private clouds today, but the priority enterprises are

putting on private clouds and the implications that fact has for future private cloud infrastructures may well surprise

you. Investments in private clouds have risen to become a critical priority for 14% of enterprises and a high priority for

32%; put together, that’s nearly half of all enterprises in North America and Europe placing a high priority on

implementing a private cloud (see Figure 1).3

Figure 1

Building A Private Cloud Is A Priority For Nearly Half Of All Enterprises

“ hich of the following initiatives are likely to be your firm’s/organization’s top IT infrastructure

priorities over the next 12 months?”

(Build an in ternal private cloud operated by IT [not a service provider])

3%

2%

28%

23%

33%

29%

26%

32%

10%

14%

2011 (N = 1,240)

2012 (N = 1,036)

Don ’t know/NA Not on ou r agenda Low priority High priority Critical priority

Base: North American and European IT executives and technology decision-makers

Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2012, Forrester Research, Inc.

Private Clouds Must Be Clouds — Not Just Virtualized ResourcesDon’t get too excited about these numbers just yet — the desire to provide private clouds is largely unmatched by the

actual provisioning of internal clouds. Sadly, too many enterprises simply slap a cloud label onto their virtualized

environments — a practice Forrester calls “cloudwashing.” A cloud environment must have the following

characteristics that clearly distinguish it from static virtualization environments:

• Standardized operating procedures. Process standardization makes clouds far more efficient than traditional

virtualized environments (or any other pre-cloud infrastructure deployment option). Clouds require consistent

implementation of key operational tasks, including infrastructure and workload deployment, patches and

upgrades, live migration, and (eventually) the extraction of the workload from the environment when it is nolonger needed. Anything repeatable — workload patterns, infrastructure or shared application services (such as a

specific type of storage service or a messaging layer), enterprise architecture standards, and master images —

should be documented for consistent deployment.

• Fully automated operations. If you standardize the key operating procedures, those processes can (and should)

be fully automated. Fully automated cloud environments give customers the autonomy to deploy workloads

quickly. They give IT leadership confidence and reliability, because only automated capabilities can be deployed





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autonomously without causing chaos in the environment. This becomes especially true when full workflows and

complete deployment patterns can be automated — along with the internal approval processes that go with them.

There should be no need for IT, application, enterprise architect, or even business and finance managers to

manually intervene in cloud workload deployments when a pattern or automated workflow is requested.

• Self-service access for the consumer. Developers love public IaaS clouds because they can leverage these services

on their own and be productive immediately. They expect the same from private clouds, which is why all private

clouds should provide self-service through a portal and, if possible, an application programming interface (API).

Ideally, this API will be a standard interface shared by many public and private environments, such as the

emerging OpenStack initiative.4 This lets developers configure applications once and deploy them to multiple

environments.

• Shared tenancy and maximum utilization. For a private cloud to be an efficient investment, it must be shared as

widely within the company as possible. This means engineering, marketing, finance, and even human resources

sharing the same pool of infrastructure. With logical tenancy (rather than physically isolated tenancy), you can

maximize use of resources and flex resource allocations between departments based on the peaks and valleys of

business cycles — a core requisite for cloud management. Multitenancy also lets you configure environments

with different security and compliance requirements on the same infrastructure (a standard and automated

deployment makes the auditing of this deployment easier).

• Bonus: cost transparency. Shared tenancy also makes it easier to track and account for the resources used by

each department. All cloud environments benefit when they freely reveal resource allocations to users and

departments, and can allocate cost based on use. Even software license management gets easier, because licenses

can be isolated to specific tenant environments (or departments). Experience with public clouds says that this

transparency will curtail the parking of workloads that aren’t actually being used — a key problem in enterprise

infrastructures today. Cost transparency also helps an organization distinguish public, private, cloud, and

noncloud environments based on cost-workload matches. Hybrids are ultimately more cost-efficient than any

cloud or noncloud environment on its own.

Enterprises that want to create private clouds will figure out how to implement these features and leverage the full

benefits of cloud computing within their data centers for the first generation of applications. But they must also turn

their attention to designing their environments to accommodate the next generation of cloud applications; enterprise

applications are diverse by nature and demand special security, performance, and reliability considerations.





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Most enterprises startedtheir cloud journey with

lower-risk applications thathad high agilityrequirements.

Challenge: Enterprise Workloads Raise New RequirementsMost enterprises today started their cloud journey with low-risk applications and high agility requirements. These

applications usually educate and inform customers, partners, and employees using publicly available data. The

applications tend to use web technologies and modern architectures that can be easily scaled on commodity

infrastructures using load balancing and service cloning. Batch workloads are

also popular on clouds and have the same easy fit with commodity

infrastructures.5

Increasingly, however, I&O pros are bringing transaction-based applications

into cloud environments, suggesting that these pros have growing trust in cloud platforms — even to the point of

recognizing the cloud as a suitable disaster recovery target.6 The survey data suggests that in the next year we will see a

marked increase in the number of traditional “core” enterprise applications — that means business- and mission-critical applications — migrating to private cloud environments (see Figure 2 and see Figure 3). These core enterprise

applications pose special problems for I&O pros implementing private clouds:

• Core enterprise applications process transactions — lots of transactions — and so can’t be scaled by adding load

balancers and spawning new copies of services. They scale by adding capacity to the transaction processing

engine and its database(s). They house the crown jewels of corporate data and thus are highly secured and often

require specialized hardware to keep up with the transaction volumes they process.

• Mission-critical applications need to maintain ironclad transactional and process integrity and thus have more

stringent infrastructure resiliency requirements than other workloads.

As core enterprise applications (including mission-critical workloads) move into the cloud, they will put pressure on

I&O teams to ensure that their private clouds can deliver the highest possible SLAs if, as, or when needed. This doesn’t

mean that the entire cloud has to deliver the highest SLAs, only that those levels of service must be available as part of

the private cloud. A key way to provide high SLAs is to add more resilient infrastructures to your private cloud. And as

private clouds mature, it’s not just resiliency that private clouds must provide.





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Figure 2

Many Enterprises Plan To Bring Core Applications To The Cloud In 2013

“What ypes of applications do you plan to host on cloud platforms?”

43%

40%

35%

31%

28%

22%

20%

19%

26%

41%

32%

27%

25%

28%

38%

31%

20%

11%

18%

23%

22%

24%

21%

24%

9%

6%

10%

13%

18%

20%

16%

17%

3%

1%

3%

4%

5%

3%

3%

5%

1%

1%

1%

2%

3%

1%

4%

Customer/partner facing applications

Internal employee-facing applications(intranet, collaboration, productivity, etc.)

Internal back-office applications(accounting, ERP, supply chain

management, etc.)

Business reporting and analysisapplications for SQL and other structured

data

Online transaction processing (OLTP)

Highly distributed workloads (Hadoop,real-time analysis, unstructured data)

Business reporting and analysisapplications for unstructured data

Rendering, image editing or compute-intensive simulation (very CPU intensive

applications with little I/O demand)

Plan to deploy in next 6 months

Plan to deploy in the next 12 months

Plan to deploy but have no concrete time frame

No plans to deploy

No plans because we do not believe this workload is a fit with cloud environments

Don’t know/does not apply

Core enterprise workloads

Base: 200 North American, Brazilian, and European IT executives and technology decision-makers

(percentages may not total 100 because of rounding)Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM, October 2012





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Enterprise customers wantto be able to select virtual

resources designed toavoid — or at least rapidlyrecover from — failures.

Figure 3

Trend: Enterprises Plan To Bring Mission-Critical Applications To The Cloud

1%

11%

58%

16%

6%

7%

0%

29%

62%

15%

0%

6%

Don’t know

None

1-10

11-20

21-50

More than 50

Not using cloud

Using cloud

“Approximately how many mission-critical applications do you have in the cloud

today, and how will this number change in the next 12 months?”

Today Next 12 months

0%

5%

49%

19%

15%

11%

6%

14%

45%

9%

12%

14%

Don’t know

None

1-10

11-20

21-50

More than 50

Base: 197 North American, Brazilian and European IT executives and technology decision-makers

(percentages may not total 100 because of rounding)

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM, October 2012

Enterprises Need More Configuration Choices

Our survey suggests that, as cloud environments mature and more of the application portfolio moves to theseenvironments, requirements for specific infrastructure configuration options will rise on many fronts. Looking just at

resiliency needs, our survey suggests that enterprise customers want options for

selecting virtual resources from a pool designed to avoid component failures at all

costs, and to rapidly recover those that do occur (see Figure 4). The highest

priorities in our survey:

• Rapid recovery from failures. Some core enterprise applications have

application-recovery SLAs of minutes, including application data. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said that

this characteristic of private clouds was critically important or very important.

• Zero-downtime environments. A truism in cloud computing is that architectures must quickly recover from

inevitable failures in infrastructure. Eighty-six percent of respondents believe that it is critically important or very

important for services within their cloud to be engineered to avoid failures — a more traditional view of system

reliability.

• Guaranteed (read: predictable) application performance. Application performance guarantees is also a priority

among our survey respondents; 82% cited them as critically important or very important. Performance

guarantees are typically expressed in terms of user response times and batch windows, and give I&O pros a basis

for offering such quality-of-service commitments to their IT and business partners.





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As business- and mission-critical applications

migrate to the cloud, theybring with them their

requirements for tightersecurity.

Figure 4

Cloud Customers Want Greater Reliability Options In Private Clouds

1%

2%

1%

4%

9%

5%

2%

2%

3%

3%

4%

6%

4%

14%

9%

8%

10%

14%

14%

21%

20%

28%

22%

32%

36%

38%

40%

24%

44%

41%

39%

28%

32%

52%

48%

42%

56%

30%

32%

24%

27%

22%

Engineered to rapidly recover from failure

Engineered to avoid any and all failures

Guaranteed application performance (QoS)

Highest degree of security (HIPAA, FedRAMP, PCI,etc.)

Infrastructure transparency (visibility into theinfrastructure (type, vendor, CPU, etc.) your

applications run on)

High degrees of elasticity (from low numbers to1,000s of VMs seamlessly on demand, for example)

Guaranteed infrastructure choice (lets you specify thetype of infrastructure your applications run on)

Geographic breadth (data centers on multiplecontinents and/or in multiple countries)

Minimize electric power consumption to save cost

Not important at all — 1 2 3 4 Critically important — 5

“How important is it for your cloud platform to have the following reliability characteristics?”


(“Don’t know” responses have been omitted)


Enterprise Data In The Cloud Heightens The Need For Ironclad SecurityAs business- and mission-critical applications migrate to the cloud, they spawn requirements for heightened data

security (see Figure 5). As clouds manage pools of resources serving many tenants, these requirements put additional

pressure on the private-cloud system design to ensure that workloads are well

isolated from one another. The highest security priorities in our survey were:

• Hackproof architectures. When you’re placing the crown jewels in a

vault, you’re able to sleep at night if you are confident the vault is

impregnable and the gems are secure. I&O pros employ security appliances and other specific hardware and design systems that are optimized for high security to make their

vaults as impregnable as possible. Nearly all respondents (96%) require this for at least some of their applications.

• Highly configurable security options as part of the service offering. Not every application houses the crown

jewels — organizations will not want to expend the extra effort and resources for highly secure workloads to the

whole private cloud. Private clouds must offer the extra-security options such as encryption, audit traceability,





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and isolated instances as services that can be applied only to the workloads that need them. More than 85% of

respondents expressed a need for many of these features for at least some of their cloud applications.

Figure 5Security Requirements Also Call For Cloud Infrastructures To Offer More Choices

1%

2%

4%

2%

2%

3%

4%

2%

6%

4%

4%

4%

5%

10%

8%

8%

10%

10%

26%

38%

29%

34%

27%

31%

30%

36%

34%

38%

35%

35%

38%

38%

38%

42%

38%

26%

32%

22%

28%

20%

24%

20%

16%

14%

24%

Infrastructure that guarantees security (hack-proof architectures,security-specific hardware components)

Highly configurable security parameters

Security operations transparency via audit statements (SAS-70,

SSAE-16, detailed self-audit of secure operations)

Let my company audit the cloud providers’ procedures directly

Configurable data encryption options (where applied, what type,etc.)

Compliance with key industry standards (HIPAA, FedRAMP, PCI,etc.)

A more secure hypervisor

Dedicated and/or isolated instances

Unique data centers that comply with specific security parameters(e.g., a separate data center for government users only)

None of my applications require this — 1 2 Some applications require this — 3 4 All my applications require this — 5

“How important is it for your cloud platform to have the following security characteristics?”




Enterprises Want Support For Multiple SLAs And Integration With Mainframe DataIn addition to reliability and security, many enterprise applications share a number of other characteristics that our

survey respondents say are important for their cloud environments to provide (see Figure 6). At the top of this list of

priorities, 83% of respondents cite application recovery SLAs as critically important or very important — echoing ourearlier finding on the importance of recovering from failures. The next two highest priorities address management and

access to data that is typically crucial:

• Common monitoring of hybrid cloud environments. Hybrid, in this context, describes diversity of hosting

locations, infrastructure, providers, etc. Among respondents, 70% said that monitoring of hybrid clouds is

critically important or very important; an additional 24% identified this characteristic as having some importance

and only 2% said it is not important at all. The finding strongly suggests that enterprise IT leaders expect to use





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more than one cloud environment to deliver applications and will often need to manage those multiple clouds

from a unified console or set of operational controls.

• Access to data on the mainframe. Data maintained on mainframes tends to be crucial business data that is vital

for many applications, increasingly including applications executing in cloud environments. Thus, it’s no surprise

to us that 67% of survey respondents said access to mainframe data was critically important or very important in

cloud environments, and only 5% said it was not important at all.

Figure 6

Cloud Customers Want Greater SLA Options And Access To Mainframe Data

1%

2%

5%

2%

2%

4%

3%

4%

2%

4%

8%

8%

8%

6%

4%

10%

14%

24%

21%

24%

28%

28%

30%

25%

44%

47%

32%

35%

35%

38%

39%

37%

39%

23%

35%

30%

28%

25%

24%

24%

Rapid application recovery SLAs

Common monitoring for hybrid cloud environments

Access to mainframe-resident data

Support for very large workloads within a single verylarge virtual machine or container (e.g., 32-CPU, 512GBs

of RAM)

Support for high volume of small and very smallworkloads

Support for large-scale OLTP workloads

Support for specific programming languages

Support for large-scale batch environments

Not important at all — 1 2 3 4 Critically important — 5

“How important is it for your cloud platform to have the following workload characteristics?”




The remaining “workload” factors highlight the diversity of enterprise applications, with both large and small

workloads being represented, as well as both OLTP and batch applications. Clouds can’t magically consolidate andnormalize this diversity, but I&O professionals can expand the capabilities of cloud platforms to accommodate it.

Solution: Hybrid Architectures For Enterprise Clouds

Given the tidal wave of additional requirements coming at your private cloud effort, how should you prepare? There are

two wrong answers to that question. The first is to try to build the most resilient, robust, high performance cloud





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possible for all of your workloads. That approach will simply burden your organization with the cost of engineering for

peak requirements, while many — if not most — of your workloads won’t have these needs. The second is to try to

force-fit all of your enterprise workloads into a cloud backed by a single type of infrastructure. No single infrastructure

type is likely to suffice.

The better approach is to think of your private cloud platform as a collection of services that can be applied discretely:

workload by workload or tenant by tenant, depending on the implementation approach. Whatever it is today, your

private cloud ultimately will encompass a diverse set of services. Again, the public cloud providers set a precedent by

setting policies that incur additional cost only where they know they will recoup these costs, and to offer their various

services in a “cloud way” — standardized, automated, and virtualized.

Customers Value The Choice Of Higher Security, Reliability, And QoSCustomers really want choice, and they’re willing to pay for it — especially when the cost of choice is transparent. We

find that with cost transparency, customers tend to select the resources and service options that are most appropriate to

their needs. Without cost transparency and/or a “cost” impact to their business unit, business leaders see no downside

to wasting resources by selecting the best possible option — hey, who cares if IT gets stuck with the bill? Businesses

can’t afford this parochial budget behavior. Don’t make this mistake; present your application delivery teams with

options and get paid (or paid back) for what you provide.

Moreover, respondents using cloud computing today attach a higher value to QoS choice than those who don’t use

clouds. Experience has taught these enterprise leaders that 1) higher reliability and security are difficult to obtain from

cloud platforms and 2) broad use of cloud requires these and other enterprise characteristics. The flipside of this

analysis: People inexperienced with cloud likely don’t understand the reality of enterprise applications in cloud

environments. Comparing the two groups, the number of cloud users willing to pay a 50% to 100% premium — or

more — for higher QoS is striking (see Figure 7).





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Figure 7

Cloud Customers Willing To Pay A Premium For Greater QoS Options

16%

27%

17%

23%

22%

24%

27%

42%

28%

47%

29%

45%

34%

41%

37%

50%

37%

52%

34%

41%

34%

42%

34%

41%

25%

21%

24%

18%

22%

17%

22%

14%

16%

5%

19%

9%

16%

11%

10%

8%

12%

5%

10%

2%

13%

6%

7%

3%

10%

11%

2%

7%

3%

6%

2%

9%

10%

2%

Cloud

Non-cloud

Cloud

Non-cloud

Cloud

Non-cloud

Cloud

Non-cloud

Cloud

Non-cloud

Cloud

Non-cloud

C h o i c e o f

s e c u r i t y

o p t i o n s

C h o i c e o f

r e l i a b i l i t y

o p t i o n s

C h o i c e o f

a v a i l a b i l i t

y o p t i o n s

C h o i c

e

o

f

w o r k l o a

d

o p t i o n

s

C h o i c e o f

i n f r a s t r u c

t u r e

p l a t f o r m

C h o i c e

o f O S

a n d

m i d d l e w

a r e

s o f t w a r e

a n d

g e o g r a p

h i c r e a c h

Not willing to pay more

Willing to pay up to 20% more



Willing to pay more than 100% premium

Choice of reliability

options

Choice of

infrastructure

platform

Choice of OS and

middleware and

geographic reach

Choice of

availability options

Choice of workloadoptions

Choice of security

options

“How much more would you be willing to pay for the following capabilities if a provider offered them?”

Base: 134 North American, Brazilian, and European hardware and infrastructure decision-makers using cloud and 64 North American and

European hardware and infrastructure decision-makers not using cloud



Mainframes Can Meet Advanced QoS NeedsClouds based on commodity infrastructure cannot meet the full range of QoS requirements that are available in

enterprises. Not even high-end configurations of commodity infrastructure can satisfy the full range of requirements.

The full range of QoS needs, including full, end-to-end fault tolerance, is only fulfilled today on mainframe systems.

Mainframes are engineered to prevent failures (many customers experience years without unplanned downtime).

Mainframes have deep and configurable security features, as well as strong support for PCI, encryption, and other key

security compliance standards. And mainframe architectures can support workload and virtual machine densities that

are dramatically higher than the densities cloud administrators would be comfortable with on commodity systems.

The good match between advanced enterprise requirements and mainframe capabilities means that “big iron” can play

a role in private clouds to meet those requirements. How extensive a role will depend on the scope of high-scale

reliability and security requirements, and the need to support a breadth of OLTP and other enterprise scenarios.

The scope of the mainframe’s role should also reflect the diversity of operating systems, platforms, and frameworks that

your organization needs in its private cloud. In our survey, for example, the vast majority of respondents reported using

one primary operating system as well as major Unix and Linux distributions. Of these options, Linux (and its more





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than 1,500 ISV applications, open source databases such as Postgres, and open source middleware including Apache

Tomcat) runs natively on mainframe systems. Popular programming languages are also well supported as a native

option on the mainframe, as well as web-friendly frameworks like Ruby on Rails and PHP.

Most enterprises will need one primary operating system and/or at least one Unix variety in their private clouds. This

reality means private clouds will have hybrid infrastructures of some sort behind it that employ mainframes. Those

hybrids may be customer-assembled or provided as a package by a vendor, but hybrids they will be nonetheless.

Cloud Customers Are Open To The MainframeOur survey suggests that enterprise customers are open to the idea of private cloud services based on mainframe

infrastructure. Given a long list of features and characteristics available on a mainframe-based cloud service,

respondents showed a receptive attitude overall to the mainframe. The strongest preferences were for high-security

features: compliance with HIPAA, FedRAMP, PCI, and other security and compliance standards; security

configuration and operations transparency; and a more secure hypervisor. High-performance characteristics were next

most popular, led by guaranteed infrastructure resource performance (see Figure 8).

These findings disprove the notion that mainframes are a legacy that has no place in new cloud computing

environments. For customers that require high QoS levels in security, reliability, and performance, our results show

that most customers are willing to consider cloud services that employ mainframes to provision these features as cloud

services — very small percentages of respondents viewed the mainframe in these contexts as negative (see Figure 9).

Additionally, our findings indicate that the advanced features provided by mainframes in security, reliability, and

performance are highly valued by customers.

However, some users have an inherent dislike of the mainframe — in some cases, their understanding of what

mainframes are as platforms may be years out of date. So be careful how much you promote the mainframe’s presence

in your private cloud service portfolio to avoid negative reactions to your private cloud. In the final analysis, the types of

infrastructures your private cloud employs will be less important than the quality of the services your private cloudprovides — especially when the details of the infrastructure that provisions them is properly abstracted. Your private

cloud will be a hybrid of multiple infrastructures “designed to operate securely” behind standardized and fully

automated cloud services.





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Figure 8

Enterprise Cloud Users Are Willing To Deploy To Clouds Based On The Mainframe

52%

35%

34%

38%

38%

32%

42%

35%

40%

56%

39%

47%

37%

54%

33%

38%

26%

36%

28%

40%

29%

44%

39%

32%

32%

37%

33%

35%

51%

51%

44%

44%

49%

36%

43%

37%

20%

37%

27%

37%

19%

40%

32%

44%

33%

40%

27%

38%

22%

27%

32%

32%

26%

30%

Security operations transparency via audit statements (SAS-70, SSAE-16, detailed self-audit of secure operations)

Let my company audit the cloud providers’ procedures directly

Compliance with key industry standards (HIPAA, FedRAMP, PCI, etc.)

Guaranteed LAN network performance (within the cloud data center)

A more secure hypervisor

Highly configurable security parameters

Guaranteed WAN network performance (external to the cloud)

High levels of guaranteed storage performance

Workload-specif ic hardware components (such as GPUs, SSDs, encryptionhardware, code acceleration hardware, etc.)

Guaranteed CPU performance

Unique data centers that comply with specific security parameters (e.g., aseparate data center for government users only)

Unix/RISC platforms

Configurable data encryption options (where applied, what type, etc.)

Support for specif ic programming languages

Infrastructure that guarantees security (hack-proof architectures, security-specific hardware components)

Support for large-scale OLTP workloads platform

Guaranteed network performance between cloud data centers (within a singlecloud service)

Access to mainframe-resident data platform

Choice of geographic locale (ability to choose the geolocation of where certaindata reside)

Direct access to specific storage equipment (specific storage arrayypes, specific disc types)

Guaranteed high degrees of infrastructure redundancy for continuousperformance

Guaranteed memory (RAM) performance

Engineered to rapidly recover from failure

Middleware configuration (you can configure it somewhat)

Support for very large workloads (within a single very large virtual machine or container)

Engineered to avoid any and all failures

Highest degrees of security (HIPAA, FedRAMP, PCI, etc.)

4 Very willing — 5

“To what degree would you be willing to use a cloud service that met or exceeded all of your expectations

(cost, service levels, failover, security, etc.) for your cloud needs but used the mainframe platform in some

way to do it ?”

Base: 30 or more North American, Brazilian, and European hardware and infrastructure decision-makers






Page 15

Figure 9

Mainframe Value? Yes. Mainframe By Name? Not So Much.

4%

5%

2%

4%

10%

10%

8%

34%

40%

50%

47%

36%

27%

22%

27%

26%

20%

13%

16%

Organizations with mainframe

Organizations without mainframe

Organizations with mainframe

Organizations without mainframe

D e l i v e r e d o n m a i n f r a m e

D e l i v e r e d o n o

t h e r s e r v e r

t y p e

s

Negatively influence my decision —1 2 Neutral — 3 4 Positively influence my decision — 5

“If the below infrastructure options were used to deliver your top critical characteristics (without diminishing the core cloud

computing business values) how would this influence your decision-making?”

Base: 70 North American, Brazilian, and European hardware and infrastructure decision-makers with mainframe and 130 North American and

European hardware and infrastructure decision-makers without mainframe







Page 16

KEY RECOMMENDATIONS

To get private clouds right in your organization requires understanding cloud first, then meshing the new capabilities with

the needs of your organization. The survey makes one thing abundantly clear: Your private cloud environment must

provide a wide range of services that cannot be met by a single uniform cloud service based on commodity servers, storage,

and virtualization infrastructure. Why? Virtually all survey respondents noted that at least some part of their workloadsrequire zero-downtime services, high reliability SLAs, hackproof architectures and highly configurable security, deep

visibility and manageability of virtualized environments, and powerful integration with mainframe data — sweet spots for

mainframe provisioning. Other workloads are less demanding, calling for three 9s or four 9s availability and periods of

permissible downtime; they can be placed on other architectures with levels of service that are commensurate with the

workload characteristics. For a very large percentage of our survey respondents, a hybrid architecture emerges as the

optimal solution. However, to get enterprise private cloud right, this means that you must:

• Use abstraction to your advantage. In cloud environments, you never expose the raw infrastructure to a workload

— it is all virtualized. This gives you, as the cloud designer or architect, greater freedom to select the actual

underlying infrastructure and change out and expand these choices over time. Being a cloud abstracts the user and

application from the infrastructure — enabling infrastructure flexibility. Abstraction allows you to employ a variety

of underlying infrastructures, including mainframes, Unix SMP servers, and x86 servers as needed to satisfy

requirements.

• Think services and options. You will have a better chance of supporting multiple workload types with different

resource options within your cloud than with a single uniform set of servers and storage options. As you plan your

private cloud, open your designs to the full range of infrastructure options you employ today, as well as new

options. As our study indicates, the traditional strengths of the mainframe in reliability, security, and quality of

service management will be an effective choice in constructing private cloud services that meet demanding

enterprise requirements.

• Get paid for your cloud investments. Cloud investments pay off through shared use and reuse of the resources

behind the cloud-service abstraction. Ensure that any resource or service options you add to the private cloud have

broader appeal than a single developer or department. If you have an isolated service request, satisfy it with

traditional infrastructure until you can build a broader business case to support creation of a cloud service. This

requirements-driven approach to your organization’s private cloud — and will ensure a positive ROI from yourcloud investments.

• Include your mainframe in cloud infrastructures to enable a broad mix of infrastructure service options. You

could certainly offer mainframe virtual partitions as a service. You could offer Linux virtual machines from both the

mainframe (when high SLAs are sought) and from commodity infrastructure (when SLAs are lower). Mainframes

also can better accommodate high densities of very small workloads with resource guarantees — something very

difficult to achieve on commodity resources.





Appendix A: Methodology

In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 200 North American, Brazilian, and European hardware and

infrastructure decision-makers to evaluate enterprise demands for cloud environments. Questions provided to the

participants asked about their server environments, cloud deployments, and key application requirements. Two key

data cuts examined included the contrast in responses from organizations with mainframe servers and those without.

An additional cut segmented some respondents as current “cloud” users and other that were not. To qualify as a cloud

user, respondents had to have applications deployed using cloud at a specialty cloud provider for up to four years, at a

traditional service provider for up to two years, at traditional outsourcing partner for up to 12 months, or within their

corporate data center for up to six months. Respondents were offered an incentive as a thank-you for time spent on the

survey. The study began in October 2012 and was completed in the same month.

Appendix B: Endnotes

1 Leading public IaaS clouds including Amazon Web Services, CloudSigma, and GoGrid today offer infrastructure

services with GPUs, SSDs, 10 GbE connections and other infrastructure options. These capabilities are provided as

infrastructure resource types served up from specific pools of infrastructure, but are fully capable of leveraging all other

cloud services from this provider.

2 The first generation of applications to move onto cloud platforms tend to be new, based on open web technologies and

open source middleware, and are a good fit for uniform commodity infrastructures.

3 Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2012, Forrester Research, Inc.

4 Source: OpenStack (http://www.openstack.org/).

5 In a survey of infrastructure and operations professionals during Q3 2012, 46% reported using internal private cloud

IaaS for web applications, collaboration portal servers, and other “session applications.” Twenty-five percent reported

running compute-intensive applications on their internal cloud environments. Many of these are batch workloads.

Only 29% reported running transactional applications on their internal private cloud IaaS.

6 “An Infrastructure And Operations Pro’s Guide To Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Services,” Forrester Research, Inc.,

April 6, 2012.