The platform you already own may actually be open, expandable, and inexpensive enough to be the centerpiece of your broader cloud strategy. Technology and SI vendors from across the entire  ecosystem—both the established and the early movers and shakers—have been implementing cloud architectures for infrastructure, platform, and software. Cloud prefixes such as “public,” “private,” “hybrid,” and “community” no longer represent the entity that owns the cloud as much as the security and management profiles of the data and applications of the workloads they’re supposed to support.

As we try to gain a more holistic view of all the assets that should go into the planned cloud domains and their different layers, an obvious question is, “Is there a role and place for the mainframe in this transformation?” 

The mainframe is as active as ever and has no plans to slow down, much less leave, virtualization as the “exclusive” turf of the x86 platform. According to a January 2011 report titled IBM System z MIPS Shows Increased Centralization and a Return to Growth, research firm ITCandor estimates that from 2009 to 2010, IBM’s price per MIPS declined 16 percent, revenue grew by 14 percent to $4.9B, and MIPS grew by 35 percent. Also in 2010, IBM shipped 640 System z systems and 5.6 billion MIPS at $880 per MIPS. ITCandor predicts that along with an increase in zEnterprise sales, sales of mainframe and UNIX machines will grow in 2011, finding a role in private and hybrid clouds…