There is still a market for mainframes.

According to foreign media reports, Israeli startup Model9 recently announced that it has received $ 9 million in Series A financing. Intel Capital led the round, and the company’s previous investors include StageOne, North First Ventures and Glenrock Israe. According to Model9, the company has now raised nearly $ 13 million.

On the official website, Model9 introduces itself as a “cloud data manager for mainframes.” Specifically, Model 9 proposes a method for transferring data between mainframes and the cloud. At present, many large companies around the world, such as large banks, insurance companies, airlines, and retailers, still use mainframes to handle transactions. These companies need these machines for large-scale transaction processing, but also find it difficult to combine valuable data with more modern analytics capabilities. This is the dilemma that Model 9 tries to solve.

Gil Peleg, CEO and co-founder of Model9, said the company’s technology is focused on helping mainframe users store their data in the cloud or other on-premise storage. The company demonstrated several important use cases. First, it can act as a disaster recovery system, eliminating the need to maintain expensive tape backups. It can also move this data to the cloud, and customers can apply modern analytics to data that was previously inaccessible.

The company’s solutions work with cloud solutions from AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and IBM, as well as with other on-premises storage solutions, such as EMC, Nutanix, NetApp, and Hitatchi. The goal is to give customers a true hybrid cloud option, whether it’s a private or public cloud provider.

“Our customers will ideally deploy a hybrid cloud topology and benefit from both. The mainframe, as a reliable, secure, and trusted (machine), has been doing what it should do. The cloud can manage scale and rapidly growing data and provide new and modern technologies such as disaster recovery, data management and analysis. “Peleg said.

It is understood that Model9 was founded in 2016 and spent several years developing solutions. Today, the company is working with many large organizations that use mainframes. In Peleg’s plan, he wants to use the financing to expand sales and marketing operations to expand the market for the solution.

A mainframe is a hardware system that uses a dedicated processor instruction set, operating system, and application software. It can handle large amounts of data and business volume in finance, telecommunicationsIt’s more common in domain use. It is reported that at least about 70% of global financial systems are still using centralized architectures in 2019 (the typical case of centralized architectures is a system composed of computing equipment, database technology and storage equipment provided by IBM, Oracle, EMC) To process various data. And two-thirds of the Fortune 100 companies use IBM Z. In this area, IBM has more than 90% market share. In September 2019, IBM released the mainframe system Z15, which can process 1 trillion network transactions a day, support multiple large databases, and deploy 2.4 million Linux containers.

“It is still a very stable and reliable platform. This has not changed its fundamental purpose. In the past, including banking, aviation, insurance, etc., its core applications are on this, the most important is Data assets on the mainframe. “Hou Miao, vice president of IBM, said in an interview.

At present, there are already some companies in China that cooperate with IBM mainframes. For example, Tongchuang Yongyi, founded in 2009, is committed to providing services in the field of business continuity and disaster recovery. It can simultaneously manage the disaster tolerance environment of IBM Z series mainframes, i series midrange machines and OpenStack cloud environments. At the same time, many companies around the world provide services in the field of cloud data management. Founded in 2006, Veeam is an established and leading cloud data management service provider. It is in the “Leaders” quadrant in the Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions announced by Gartner in May 2019. Can provide data backup and recovery, resource orchestration and automation, data monitoring and analysis and other services. Established in 2014, Rubrik provides a data management platform to help companies resolve information stored in public clouds, on-premises systems, or hybrid systems of both. The company has announced the completion of Series E financing in early 2019. There are also some companies in the disaster recovery field, such as Israeli disaster recovery startup CloudEndure. This company provides disaster recovery and data migration services across AWS, GCP, Azure and VMware, and provides subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) on AWS, which was acquired by AWS in early 2019.