Contact: John Abbott, Tejas Venkatesh
IBM still occasionally feels the need to make acquisitions that supplement and update (or sometimes help protect) its venerable mainframe technology, even though the mainframe is mature to say the least, with nearly 50 years of history behind it. This time IBM has reached for CSL International, an Israeli company that specializes in virtualization management technology for the zEnterprise mainframe. IBM is seeing strong growth in Linux deployments on its mainframes, and virtualization management makes mainframes a viable platform for hosted cloud services.
CSL is privately held and terms were not disclosed, though Globes reported the value at roughly $20m. That appears reasonable given that nine-year-old CSL is a small company with less than 10 employees. The company’s CSL-WAVE software – which has been piloted at a large US government agency and has been deployed at several financial services firms – is intended to simplify the management of z/VM (the mainframe’s native hypervisor) when used in combination with Linux on System z – and nowadays just about every mainframe that ships includes Linux as well as the proprietary z/VM operating system. CSL has partnered with IBM in the past, but also has a partnership with CA Technologies, the future of which may now be uncertain.
CSL-WAVE is a drag-and-drop tool for creating, monitoring and managing virtual servers and connecting them with CPU, memory, storage and networking resources on the mainframe. The acquisition is a response to the rapid growth in Linux deployments on the mainframe – IBM reports that shipped capacity just about doubled year-over-year in the first quarter of 2013. Easier virtualization management for Linux also makes the mainframe a more viable platform for hosting cloud services. IBM touts the efficiency of running large numbers of virtual machines on the mainframe as its architecture enables very high utilization rates, approaching 100% of computing resources able to be utilized. Virtualization was pioneered on the mainframe architecture back in the 1960s.
IBM’s previous mainframe-related acquisition was that of Platform Solutions in July 2008. That deal was more about protection than advancing the technology. Platform had revived the concept of ‘plug-compatible mainframes,’ advocating the running of IBM’s z/OS on non-IBM hardware. It was fighting a legal battle with IBM at the time of the acquisition.
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