Kyndryl Expands Mainframe Modernization To Azure Stack, Google

‘Kyndryl continues to launch capabilities to help customers launch the right workloads on the right platforms, including their mainframe workloads. Customers have critical workloads on multiple platforms and want to connect everything to the cloud,’ says Petra Goude, Kyndryl’s global practice leader for Core Enterprise and zCloud.

Global infrastructure services provider Kyndryl this week expanded its ability to help customers run or migrate their mainframe workloads to public clouds with two new integrations.

In the first, Kyndryl used its Microsoft Ignite presence Thursday to unveil a new cloud offering combining the company’s managed services expertise with Microsoft Azure Stack HCI software and Dell Technologies hardware to help businesses with on-premises, remote or third-party data center workloads accelerate their cloud transformation projects.

The Microsoft Azure Stack HCI offering also supports mainframe modernization by connecting to on-premises mainframe or distributed computing infrastructures.

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In the second, Kyndryl is working with Google Dual Run, a new service introduced Wednesday by Google as a way to migrate workloads off mainframes and onto the Google Cloud by letting the workloads work on both the cloud and on the mainframe until customers feel the time is right to take them off the mainframe altogether.

The two new mainframe-cloud integrations follow last week’s news that Kyndryl is partnering with Microsoft to allow mainframe applications to be run on Azure without the need to migrate them off the mainframe.

Together, Kyndryl, which was formerly the managed infrastructure services business of IBM before being spun out into a separate company, is taking advantage of its long history of working with mainframes to help customers modernize their mission-critical workloads, said Petra Goude, global practice leader for Core Enterprise and zCloud at New York-based Kyndryl.

“Kyndryl continues to launch capabilities to help customers launch the right workloads on the right platforms, including their mainframe workloads,” Goude told CRN. “Customers have critical workloads on multiple platforms and want to connect everything to the cloud.”

While Kyndryl last week introduced a data pipe to allow mainframe-based workloads to be run on the Microsoft Azure cloud, the new technology introduced Thursday uses Microsoft Azure Stack HCI together with Dell hardware to let the on-premises Azure Stack run both mainframe and distributed computing workloads, Goude said.

“We are using our integration to connect Azure Stack HCI to other platforms,” she said. “We create the integration layer to manage cloud, HCI and on-premises solutions. We are connecting it all together.”

The Kyndryl offering also uses the Dell Integrated System for Azure Stack HCI, based on Dell PowerEdge servers and Microsoft Azure Stack HCI software.

Kyndryl is now also providing services around Google Dual Run to customers looking to move mainframe workloads to the Google’s cloud, Goude said.

“For customers who want to move their workloads from mainframes to the Google Cloud Platform, we let them run in the cloud and on-premises,” she said. “We’re strong with mainframes and want to help customers put the right workload on the right platform. Google Dual Run is for customers who eventually want to take the workloads of the mainframes. The workloads can run on the mainframe and in Google for a while, and when it’s certain they run well in Google, they can be moved off the mainframe.”

For mainframe workloads that need to migrate to Amazon Web Services, Kyndryl works with Blu Age, which AWS acquired in 2021, Goude said.