Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Model9, an Israeli startup launched by mainframe vets, has come up with a way to transfer data between mainframe computers and the cloud, and today the company announced a $9 million Series A.

Intel Capital led the round with help from existing investors, including StageOne, North First Ventures and Glenrock Israel. The company reports it has now raised almost $13 million.

You may not realize it, but the largest companies in the world, like big banks, insurance companies, airlines and retailers, still use mainframes. These companies require the massive transaction processing capabilities of these stalwart machines, but find it’s difficult to get the valuable data out for more modern analytics capabilities. This is the hard problem that Model9 is attempting to solve.

Gil Peleg, CEO and co-founder at Model9, says that his company’s technology is focused on helping mainframe users get their data to the cloud or other on-prem storage. “Mainframe data is locked behind proprietary storage that is inaccessible to anything that’s happening in the evolving, fast-moving technology world in the cloud. And this is where we come in with patented technology that enables mainframes to read and write data directly to the cloud or any non-mainframe distributed storage system,” Peleg explained.

This has several important use cases. For starters, it can act as a disaster recovery system, eliminating the need to maintain expensive tape backups. It also can move this data to the cloud where customers can apply modern analytics to data that was previously inaccessible.

The company’s solution works with AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and IBM’s cloud solution. It also works with other on-prem storage solutions like EMC, Nutanix, NetApp and Hitatchi. He says the idea is to give customers true hybrid cloud options, whether a private cloud or a public cloud provider.

“Ideally our customers will deploy a hybrid cloud topology and benefit from both worlds. The mainframe keeps doing what it should do as a reliable, secure, trusted [machine], and the cloud can manage the scale and the rapidly growing amount of data and provide the new modern technologies for disaster recovery, data management and analytics,” he said.

The company was founded in 2016 and took a couple of years to develop the solution. Today, the company is working with a number  of large organizations using mainframes. Peleg says he wants to use the money to expand the sales and marketing operation to grow the market for this solution.

International Business Machines is living a case study of a large, established company vying to transform. Over the last decade, the technology elder has struggled to move into areas like cloud and AI. IBM has leaned on a combination of its own R&D abilities and deep pockets to push into modern markets, but has struggled to turn them into revenue growth.

At one point, Big Blue posted 22 sequential quarters of falling revenue, a mind-boggling testament to how hard it can be to turn around a juggernaut. More recently, IBM shrank for another five consecutive quarters, a streak it broke with yesterday’s news that it had beat analyst expectations. 

The quarter brought modest, but welcome revenue growth. Perhaps more importantly, the company’s top line expansion was co-led by the old IBM mainframe business and its newest champion, Red Hat.

IBM can be happy for the positive financial news, for now at least, but it needs to repeat the result. The challenge it faces moving forward will include finding a way to continue revenue growth while modernizing its product line and ensuring that its huge Red Hat purchase continues to perform.

It’s easy to think about mainframes as some technology dinosaur, but the fact is these machines remain a key component of many large organizations’ computing strategies. Today, IBM announced the latest in their line of mainframe computers, the z15.

For starters, as you would probably expect, these are big and powerful machines capable of handling enormous workloads. For example, this baby can process up to 1 trillion web transactions a day and handle 2.4 million Docker containers, while offering unparalleled security to go with that performance. This includes the ability to encrypt data once, and it stays encrypted, even when it leaves the system, a huge advantage for companies with a hybrid strategy.

Speaking of which, you may recall that IBM bought Red Hat last year for $34 billion. That deal closed in July and the companies have been working to incorporate Red Hat technology across the IBM business including the z line of mainframes.

IBM announced last month that it was making OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based cloud-native tools, available on the mainframe running Linux. This should enable developers, who have been working on OpenShift on other systems, to move seamlessly to the mainframe without special training.

IBM sees the mainframe as a bridge for hybrid computing environments, offering a highly secure place for data that when combined with Red Hat’s tools, can enable companies to have a single control plane for applications and data wherever it lives.

While it could be tough to justify the cost of these machines in the age of cloud computing, Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says it could be more cost-effective than the cloud for certain customers. “If you are a new customer, and currently in the cloud and develop on Linux, then in the long run the economics are there to be cheaper than public cloud if you have a lot of IO, and need to get to a high degree of encryption and security,” he said.

He added, “The main point is that if you are worried about being held hostage by public cloud vendors on pricing, in the long run the z is a cost-effective and secure option for owning compute power and working in a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world.”

Companies like airlines and financial services companies continue to use mainframes, and while they need the power these massive machines provide, they need to do so in a more modern context. The z15 is designed to provide that link to the future, while giving these companies the power they need.

 IBM is doing its damnedest to keep the mainframe relevant in a modern context, and believe it or not, there are plenty of monster corporations throughout the world who still use those relics from the earliest days of computing. Today, the company unveiled the z14, its latest z-Series mainframe, which comes with the considerable draw of full encryption. Is that enough for even corporate giants… Read More

 IBM wants to bring machine learning to its traditional mainframe customers, and eventually to any technology with large data stores hidden behind a company firewall in what IBM calls a “private cloud.”
Yes mainframes, those ginormous computing machines from an earlier age, are still running inside some of the world’s biggest companies including banks, insurance companies… Read More

 Somewhere in a world full of advanced technology that we write about regularly here on TechCrunch, there exists an ancient realm where mainframe computers are still running programs written in COBOL.
This is a programming language, mind you, that was developed in the late 1950s, and used widely in the ’60s and ’70s and even into the ’80s, but it’s never really gone away. Read More

 You might not think that ‘Linux’ and ‘mainframe’ belong in the same sentence, but IBM has been putting various flavors of Linux on its mainframe computers for 15 years. Today IBM and Canonical announced that the two companies were teaming up to build one running Ubuntu Linux. The new unit is called the LinuxOne. The announcement comes as part of a broader strategy… Read More

 In a time when IBM has been dumping its x86 server business, and the mainframe would seem a relic of a bygone day, Big Blue took five years and invested a cool $1B to develop a new mainframe beast for the modern mobile era. You want a high-end computing system for a contemporary company, the new system dubbed the z13, is smokin’ and has been designed specifically to handle… Read More