Big Blue is marking the 50th anniversary of the IBM mainframe with the announcement of new mobile, storage and Hadoop capabilities for its System z line of mainframe computers.
Back in April 7 of 1964 the company announced the System/360 mainframe computer. It was the first family of computers built on solid logic semiconductor technology.
The slowest System/360 had a top speed of 0.034 million instructions per second (MIPS). The fastest model was approximately 50 times as fast with up to 8 megabytes of internal memory.
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Descendants of that technology are vastly more powerful. The newest IBM zEnterprise, the EC12 has up to 10 central processors and is capable of up to 78,000 MIPS.
With the growth of mobile transactions, the proliferation of cloud applications and demand for big data capability, IBM is further enhancing its System z family of mainframe computers with the following upgrades:
- A new solution for mobile computing – To provide clients with a platform for the rapid development and deployment of mobile applications and the complete integration of these with their core business processes, applications and data
- zDoop software – The industry’s first commercial Hadoop for Linux on System z. This allows clients to avoid staging and offloading of mainframe data to maintain existing security and governance controls
- IBM Enterprise Cloud Server – This will enable clients to build secure, reliable public or private clouds with ease. It is built as a pre-integrated, pre-configured factory built system combining hardware, storage and cloud management software based on OpenStack technology, allows MSPs to capture higher value workloads like database and middleware and customers to rapidly deploy a secure cloud environment on System z
- Flash for mainframe – The next generation of flash storage on IBM DS8870 can provide faster time to insight with up to 30X the performance over HDD
- Continuous Integration for System z –This compresses the application delivery cycle from months to weeks or days
- New version of IBM CICS Transaction Server – Provides enhanced mobile and cloud support for CICS, trusted by businesses running more than 1 billion transactions per day
- IBM WebSphere Liberty z/OS Connect – Rapidly and securely enables Web, cloud and mobile access to z/OS assets
- IBM Security zSecure SSE – Helps prevent malicious computer attacks with enhanced security intelligence and compliance reporting. zSecure can direct security events to QRadar SIEM to provide integrated enterprise wide security intelligence dashboard reporting
IBM is also rolling out a new pricing model that will provide up to 60 per cent reduction on the processor capacity for Mobile transactions which the company said can help normalize the rate of transaction growth used for software charges.
IBM Global Financing can help clients acquire z Mainframe systems, with a single financing solution to better manage their cloud and analytics infrastructure.
Credit-qualified clients can obtain fair market value leasing and loans with customized payment plans when acquiring mainframe solutions. IBM Global Asset Recovery Services can provide buyback and disposal services for removal of older IT equipment.