IBM has unveiled its next generation mainframe aimed at significantly improving performance, reducing power, cooling cost and floor space—major requirements that help to increase data center efficiency.
The new z10 is packaged as a 64-processor mainframe, which uses Quad-Core technology, built from the start to be shared, offering greater performance over virtualized x86 servers and supporting hundreds of millions of users.
Jim Stallings, general manager of IBM’s Enterprise Systems told SDA Asia that the z10 is responding to the needs of business today which are looking to reduce inefficiency in the data center and tackle complexities such as power conservation, space constraints and the lack of IT expertise needed to manage the environment.
At the same time, they are also looking to move beyond basic virtualization to an environment in which their entire IT infrastructure, including business applications, security, storage, processing power is provisioned on demand.
"This single system is capable of consolidating the work of up to thousands of servers -- sweeping the floor of the data center and reducing energy consumption, required floor space and the slew of costs associated with distributed server environments," said Stallings.
When compared to its predecessor, the z9, the z10 has the ability to be up to 50% faster and offers up to 100% performance improvement for CPU intensive jobs. Maintenance is also apparently reduced by double digits from the z9.
According to the Big Blue, the z10 is the industry’s only server providing a complete range of policy-driven functions, including Authorization Management, Utilization Management, Just-in-Time Capacity and Virtualization Security.
When asked what he considers as the z10’s competitive advantage, Stallings told SDA Asia that the z10 is the only mainframe in the market that has the ability to shrink server capacity by 85%, reduce operating cost and people cost by 80% and cut down on licensing cost by 300%.
The z10 supports Linux, XML, Java, WebSphere and increased workloads from Service Oriented Architecture implementations.
IBM invested some 100 million to develop the z10 which saw 5000 engineers working on it over a period of 5 years.
According to analyst group Gartner, IBM’s mainframe sales fell by almost 10% in 2007. |
