Model9 extends the mainframe to the cloud

Model9, a fast growing vendor for cloud management, develops an interesting solution for mainframe. The company was founded in 2016 in Israel by Gil Peleg and received so far $13.8 million from various VCs and Intel Capital in particular.

During the session with Model9 we had for the 39th IT Press Tour, we learned that mainframe continues to represent 80% of worldwide business exchanges with more than 30 billions transactions per day. Model9 understands the large opportunity and wishes to lead the mainframe cloud initiative and participate to convert users to the cloud.

Model9 Cloud Data Manager for Mainframe, released more than 3 years ago, runs on non-billable CPUs, called zIIp - IBM z Systems Integrated Information Processor - and acts as a gateway and connects the system to on-premises or cloud-based object storage like MinIO or AWS S3. This is again a good illustration that MinIO is everywhere.

Advantages and benefits are immediate with the reduction of costs, the modernization and cloud transformation of the mainframe environment, the data protection improvement and the associated HA/DR in a very easy transparent deployment and operations.

The company detailed two case studies with America First and France Gallop, the first leverages Cohesity and the second MinIO for 7 days of cache and then migrate to AWS Glacier for cold data. Both examples show a full hardware independence with no media, tape drives and library to manage and the absence of footprint in the data center.

To accelerate cloud storage adoption, the firm has started a partner program with public cloud providers and also Cloudian, Hitachi Vantara, Dell, NetApp, Cohesity and MinIO, many key players in the segment listed by Coldago Research in their last report. We even imagine IBM COS will be added, why it is not already the case like IBM cloud, DDN, Quantum and Spectra Logic should appear as well, at least we hope. We imagine it would interesting for users and Model9 to collaborate with Fujifilm for their Software-Defined Tape and StrongBox as they can do S3 to S3 to Tape.

We also found that IBM addresses similar needs with its own Cloud Tape Connector for z/OS, acting like a modern VTL but still with tape, in addition to the Model9 product it references on its website.

Model9 is definitely a solution to test and adopt for mainframe users if they wish to modernize their monolithic environment.