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IBM’s new z mainframe can handle an 8.0 magnitude earthquake

IBM z13 Mainframe

The IBM z13 Mainframe

Las Vegas, NV – IBM has announced the next iteration of its line of mainframes, the z13, that integrates analytics, is able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day, encrypt mobile transactions in real-time, and even withstand a 8.0 magnitude earthquake.

At the Interconnect 2015 conference in Las Vegas this week, the company showed off a video in which the z13 mainframe is installed on an earthquake simulator that is then turned up to 8.0 on the Richter scale. At the end, it remained standing – and functional.

“The z13 system culminates a $1 billion investment, five years of development, exploits the innovation of more than 500 new patents and represents a collaboration with more than 60 clients,” the company said in a statement.

According to the company, this is aimed to handle transaction processing in a mobile economy.

These new processing and analytic capacities should allow the machine to handle the equivalent of “100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year” and “guarantee the ability of the client to run real-time fraud detection on 100 percent of their business transactions,” IBM said.

With the z13, the company claims the ability to run up to 8,000 virtual servers through its scale-out model while lowering the total cost of ownership over three years by 32 per cent compared to an x86 cloud.  Meanwhile, the machine run on both Linux and OpenStack.

“Every time a consumer makes a purchase or hits refresh on a smart phone, it can create a cascade of events on the back end of the computing environment,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems in a statement. “Only the IBM mainframe can put the power of the world’s most secure datacenters in the palm of your hand.”