Hey, friends.
Mainframe and
midrange computers
have been reliably
powering enterprises for decades,
but as enterprises experience
the benefits of the cloud, they ponder
what to do with these aging systems,
especially their data.
Cristina Potra
is here to show me
how Microsoft is helping
customers map out their mainframe
and midrange modernization strategies.
Today on Azure Friday.
Hey, friends, I'm Scott
Hanselman and it's Azure Friday.
I'm chatting
with Cristina Potra
about mainframe
and midrange modernization.
Christina It's been a very long time
since I've seen a mainframe.
In the last time I saw it was a giant
refrigerator box in a room.
Can I put that in the cloud?
Yes, you can.
It will be in a smaller box
as we do have tools
and we have proper procedures to actually
take the workloads
that are sitting
currently on those mainframes
and migrate them to Azure,
running on out of VMs
really well.
So I know that Microsoft
has been doing this
with mainframe customers
for like 12 years.
So this isn't a new thing.
This is an experienced practice.
Yes, it is.
We've been doing it for 12 years.
The new the new part of it is
we're migrating those customers to Azure.
As before.
We would
migrate them to a windows on prem
so we know how to do it.
We have a good understanding
of the partner ecosystem
more heavily, relying on partners
for both ISV solutions
and the migration capabilities.
And those partners have been doing this
for for, as you said for a while,
the novelty of it is now
we're migrating to Azure, which
it's the, the, the, the novelty of it.
I wouldn't know how to do this as well.
Yeah, this is hugely, hugely powerful.
I used to work in
banking and online banking
and I know that 90, 96 of the world's
top 100 banks run on mainframes.
So like mainframe
make the world run
and the cloud also does too.
So this seems like a marriage
made in heaven.
This seems like a perfectly good idea,
right?
Yeah,
actually, in fact, 70% of the world's
GDP runs on mainframes today.
And we do see,
as you mentioned, a lot of those
mainframes in the banking
industry as
well in as in government
and and manufacturing
and a lot of a lot of enterprise.
They still run business
critical applications
on mainframes, on mainframes today.
Very cool.
So I understand that you have a slide
that can maybe help me understand
how we can move
these workloads into the cloud.
Yes.
So we have various solutions
for customers
because those mainframe
workloads are highly customized and
customers have various
immediate pain point
that they want to pay, points
that I want to mitigate
as long as longer,
longer term goals.
And we're trying
to find a solution
that that best fits their needs.
So for customers that are not ready
to leave their mainframes,
but they want to take
advantage of cloud capabilities,
we're offering paths in a bucket
that we call interop,
sit on your mainframe
and connect your mainframe to the cloud.
Start experiencing
taking advantage of Azure,
our services and capabilities,
and enhance your mainframe with cloud
services.
That's a
that's one option
and we'll have various paths within that.
That option
highly relying on
I.T solutions to migrate
but also have a first party solution
for that option
for customers
are ready
to offload their mainframe
workloads to Azure.
We also have multiple solution
because of their readiness
to transform and modernize.
Some customers just want to lift
and shift quickly their workload
as it is from a mainframe to an Azure VM.
So we do that.
We offer
those those customers an emulation part
where we have emulation
or running on as of the end,
running COBOL code and running
all the workloads as they are for either
the for customers
that are ready to take out of a next step
and they want to get
rid of the COBOL code
and they want to modernize,
we have another option
which basically takes COBOL
converts to Java
or DOT net Recompiled and runs on VMs.
So that's something
that we call Transform.
They're they're ready to, to,
to get rid of the COBOL
and move those workloads
to a more modern programing language
and then for those customers
that are ready to re-envision that,
that whole workload,
we are partnering with them
and helping them rewrite everything.
Cloud Native
Of course, this is the longest,
longest part
as far as time,
but it is the the end goal.
All the customers actually aim
to fully
modernize their workloads eventually.
Wow, that's really cool.
I didn't realize that there were so many
and so granular number of choices
like I just assumed
it was simply a lift and shift.
So I was assuming it was really offload
and migrate.
But there's
lots of choices depending on the customer
and depending on the mainframe
or mid-range machine that they're using.
And you say that these ISPs
then provide emulators so we can pretend
to be a mainframe in the cloud,
or we can transform that code
and basically use the logic
that the people have written historically
and run it
within a different context
is that Java or dot net?
Exactly.
And besides,
besides the offering, those tools work?
Well, we're working with those agencies
and at the engineering
level to make sure that
we cater to the customer demands
and plan for future
enhancements of their tools.
On the other side,
we're also working on our Azure
platform them to
to make sure that we're catering
to those customers coming off
of mainframe workloads.
As far as our compute storage, networking
and data needs so that
that we meet or exceed
the requirements that the mainframe
has with Azure Services.
Now, it's been a long time
since I've seen,
you know, worked on a mainframe.
I know again that they do run
a huge part of the world,
but they were huge 30 or 40 years ago.
Are they still considered huge?
Do mainframes
do things in the order of petabytes
or are mainframes
small compared to the cloud?
There's a variety we do have.
So we measure the size of a
mainframe in MIPS,
and we do have a variety of mainframe
going from 100 MIPS,
which we consider a very small
1 to 300000 MIPS.
So if you look at a the size
a small mainframe is somewhere in between
zero and 2000 meets
a medium
is up to 50,000 MIPS
and then large would consider
more than that.
Now of course depending on the size we
we do have to
perform various optimizations
and when we think about the solution
with the customer,
we do take that into account.
Right now, MIPS
is millions of instructions per session
and that's been a name,
that's been a basically
it's not a really
an accurate measurement of performance,
but it's meant to indicate
that a mainframe can do this much work.
But don't
we think about things
in terms of billions on,
you know, desktop PCs?
But I can't replace a mainframe
with my desktop computer, right?
You can unless it's a very we had
we had an actual customer
with a work of 200 MIPS
where you could replace it
with a desktop computer.
But in general, we have
so most of those big workloads.
We use our specialized larger SKUs
of the H-Series to fill them in
and make sure
that we still meet the requirements.
And for the smaller ones, they go up,
they go on our regular fleet.
Interesting.
And then mainframes aren't
just about raw processing
in the
terms of MIPS
and millions of instructions per second,
but it's also about data, right?
It's about mass
of massive amounts of data.
And they might be running iOS, DB2,
they might be running,
you know,
virtual storage access method de Sam
Do we have a path,
a target for all of those different data?
We do, actually, yes.
So if we look at the customers
that are preferring a live to
shift solution
running on emulation or
maybe even a code conversion,
we do have digital wisdom
running in Azure
for customers
that are ready to modernize.
We see that more interested in
migrating the data as well to a
to an Azure
like SQL, for example, Cosmos.
DB So we do have packs both ways.
If they want to stay on their data
legacy system for for a good reason.
We offer that
if they are ready to modernize,
we walk, we walk the journey with them
depending on where the
what they want to do
now, when in the cloud, the cloud offers
elastic city,
and with that elasticity
you get performance
and also huge cost savings.
But a mainframe is a box, and it's a box
with a fixed amount of perf
and it doesn't scale up and down.
Is this an opportunity for someone
to save money by moving into the cloud
because a mainframe may be underutilized?
Oh, totally. Exactly.
And that's one of the one of the
value prop that we have
for our customers based on deployments
that we've done so far.
The cost savings are
huge up to 80%
when they move off of a mainframe
to cloud.
And that is
very expensive, very expensive.
And they're like you said,
they're sometimes underutilized.
And scaling a mainframe,
it means sometimes buying a new box.
So between the price of hardware,
licensing, software maintainers
and all moving to Azure
is a way more efficient.
Pat
Oh, maybe you can show me
the guidance that we have.
I know that there's
a huge bunch of documentation
in the architecture section of Microsoft.
Learn to talk about both Azure
mainframe and midrange
architecture design.
I was surprised at how deep it was.
I love
discovering parts of the cloud
that I didn't know existed,
but the fact that it's running
a huge part of the world
and that Azure has a
solution is pretty cool.
Sure.
And I want to share
I want to share the
the collection of reference
architecture that the team is producing.
So think about those as recipes.
We have a variety of options
depending on the customer's situation.
So for each of those,
the team is creating the, the,
the patterns
that are reference architectures to
help customers
and to help partners,
then to help the whole
ecosystem understand
how would a workload,
how would a mainframe workflow
look like, for example, in Azure
using a wrinkle solution?
Or how would a rank
how would the mainframe
look like in Azure
using an Cisco solution?
So you will have find
this is a collection and
we have about
20 plus reference
architectures already published.
We're still working
on publishing more as we discover more,
more solutions out there and to
coming to fix a particular problems
that our customers have.
We're always, always enhancing
our solution.
Yeah,
and as you pointed out,
you mentioned Reign code,
which is a mainframe
to cloud native partner
and there's lots of different partners
with different solutions
on how to get
whether it be your IBM
mainframe into the cloud
or whatever you have.
There's a whole bunch
of operating systems, mainframe
and midrange solutions.
So no one will be left behind,
it sounds like in the cloud exactly
what would we do?
Migrations for IBM, mainframe
to do migrations for Unisys mainframes.
We're also working
with midrange customers.
We have solutions for Air Explorer.
For 400 customers
running on power systems.
We have solutions for Solaris.
So there's
there's a wide variety of options
for customers.
Very cool.
So we've got mainframe migration
framework, we've got potential
re hosting,
we've got app modernization,
data modernization,
and there's a whole ton
of architectural documentation to explain
how one could start planning that.
And they would just start
at the Microsoft Learning Center
or should they engage with their
their Microsoft partner?
We have various ways.
So sometimes is the partner
that they're engaging with a partner,
sometimes they come straight to us.
And the fact
that we have this pocket
of engineers in Microsoft
that are actually experts on
both mainframe
technology as well as Azure, we do
offer a lot of technical expertise
and help for those customers
regardless of where they're coming from.
We work with customers themselves
that are doing the
the modernization within their own I.T
departments.
We're working with partners that they're
migrating customers,
we're working with these.
So
we're
there to make sure that
the customer lands smoothly in Azure
and we have the right solution for that
to address their particular problem.
Very cool.
Well, thank you so much,
Cristina Potra,
for chatting with me today.
Thanks for the opportunity.
And certainly,
my friends,
we know that mainframes are only a part
of the overall landscape
and the digital transformation.
So if you want to learn more,
you can email legacy to the number
to Azure at Microsoft.com to learn more.
And we're going to have links
in the show notes
to all of the different things
that Christina showed us.
And I'm learning
all about mainframe
and midrange modernization in Azure today
on Azure Friday.
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