A new provider in mainframe data services in the hybrid cloud is being enabled with almost $5m in seed funding.
There may well be less mainframes in total in the world now, but the amount of data processed and stored in them is going up.
VirtualZ Computing, which provides an "out-of-the-box" solution to connect mainframes to hybrid clouds for bi-directional data access, has just announced it has raised $2.2m in seed financing, led by Next Frontier Capital. Additional investors include 2M Companies, Innosphere Ventures, and Next Coast Ventures. Including prior funding, VirtualZ has now raised $4.9m to date.
It aims to compete against much larger mainframe services vendors like IBM, BMC and Hitachi Vantara, for instance.
A significant number of large enterprises store as much as 70% of critical business data on IBM z mainframe platforms, points out VirtualZ, and large enterprises rely on them because of their unparalleled reliability, stability, security and scalability.
But accessing this data is extremely difficult. Enterprises spend millions of dollars in custom code to extract, transform and replicate data copies from mainframes to hybrid cloud or distributed storage. Data is moved at arbitrary intervals for hundreds of applications, anywhere from twice a week for some applications, to up to once an hour for others.
Additionally, enterprises cannot just move portions of the data. It requires moving all of the data, which is a resource intensive, time-consuming process that can consume up to 40% of the mainframe’s capacity, VirtualZ said.
"Data is always out of sync between the mainframe and applications in other environments, which creates a bottleneck for innovation and weakens security because multiple copies of critical and sensitive data are being moved around all the time," said the vendor. Insurance and financial services companies, for instance, must often tell customers that it may take 24-48 hours for account changes to be reflected in online, customer-facing applications.
VirtualZ's Lozen enables hybrid cloud, SaaS, distributed and custom applications to gain real-time, read-write access to mainframe data “straight away”. Data isn’t moved, instead, all apps share the data equally as a peer with mainframe applications. The solution installs "in minutes" and runs on the zIIP engine, consuming a fraction of the capacity of a general processor. The IBM z Integrated Information Processor (zIIP) is a dedicated processor designed to operate asynchronously with the general processors in a mainframe.
Will Price, founder and general partner at Next Frontier Capital, said: "I knew this was an investment we needed to make. It’s an elegant solution to an enormous problem, because so much vital business data resides on the mainframe. Without VirtualZ, it’s cumbersome, slow and expensive to access.”
Jeanne Glass, CEO and co-founder of VirtualZ, added: "With this new capital, we are building out a sales team and expanding our development capabilities. We intend to achieve first revenue quickly.
"I saw first-hand the immensity of the mainframe data problem when I was head of worldwide client relations at CA Technologies, so we know there’s strong demand for a solution, and we want to ensure we have everything in place now to support the rapid growth we expect to see.”
