IBM announces USD1 billion mainframe available in Middle East

The Z990, the most sophisticated server, can manage unprecedented capacity, scaling to process 450 million e-business transactions per day. The machine will be deployed in IBM's On Demand data centres.

"The Z990 is a highly sophisticated, powerful, mainframe class server that gives our large customers in industries such as finance, government and energy a new level of processing capability with rock solid reliability. As a single cabinet solution, the Z990 can support thousands of virtual Linux servers, potentially replacing entire data centres," said Samer Shaar, general manager of IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan.

The z990 is the most powerful and scalable IBM mainframe in the 40-year history of the product, with twice the virtualization capabilities and the ability to do nearly three times the work of the z900, a new "building block" design that allows customers to plug in new capacity without taking the system down, and a dramatically simplified product structure that reduces the number of mainframe models from 42 to 4.

"Businesses need to reduce costs and sprawling networks as well as respond more quickly to changing business environments. In today's typical IT environment there may be three to four tiers of computing, with caching and security servers on the front end, application servers as a middle layer and transaction and data processing servers on the end." Said Shaar. "By reducing the tiers of computing, customers may gain cost savings and create an environment where they can deploy new technologies such as Linux and grid solutions to create a dynamic operating environment that is capable of responding more flexibly to changing business or customer requirements. This is key to IBM's On Demand concept."

IBM also announced that IBM Global Services has begun deployment of the z990 in its On Demand Data Centers -- beginning in Boulder, Colorado -- providing new services for customers seeking mainframe computing power on demand. The new mainframe will serve as a cornerstone of the multi-platform centers, enabling customers of all sizes to acquire computing power and capacity on demand in new ways. IBM Global Services will offer mainframe capabilities, featuring technology from its Utility Management Infrastructure (UMI) service, which provides customers with fully-integrated infrastructure including mainframe processors, storage, networking and middleware.

For the first time, with On/Off Capacity on Demand, mainframe customers can power up available additional engines on demand, when they need them, and turn them off when they don't, offering the ultimate flexibility to help respond to daily or seasonal surges in demand.

The z990 features up to 9,000 MIPS (million instructions per second) on 32 processors -- twice the number of processors and almost three times the system capacity of the z900 -- and allows customers the ability to scale up from 1- to 32-way, without taking the system down.
Up to 30 logical partitions (LPARs) are supported on the z990, providing twice the LPAR capability of the z900. Running the latest version of z/VM, release 4.4, customers can quickly create and effectively manage hundreds of virtual Linux servers within one physical box. IBM's advanced virtualization technologies make the z990 an ideal consolidation platform for customers seeking to reduce the cost and management expense of server farms.

Virtualization -- the z990 architecture can support hundreds or even thousands of virtual Linux servers in a single box. That roughly equates to an entire data center on one server the size of a refrigerator.

Automation -- the z990 features IBM's exclusive Intelligent Resource Director (IRD) technology, which dynamically moves system resources to the workloads that need them, according to priorities and objectives set by the customer.

Scalability -- a single z990 offers massive capacity and the ability to scale up and out. It can scale up to process 450 million e-business transactions/day or scale out to manage hundreds of virtual Linux servers. A clustered z990 can handle up to 13 billion transactions/day, exceeding the average weekly volume on the New York Stock Exchange. The z990 also offers the ability to turn capacity on and off, allowing customers to temporarily add server engines during peak periods.

Security -- designed from the ground up to help thwart intrusion into the system, the IBM mainframe is one of the most secure servers on the market. A 16-way z990 can securely process up to 11,000 transactions/second.

Reliability -- mainframe reliability is measured in decades, not weeks or days, and the hardware availability rate for a clustered zSeries is up to 99.999%, or less than five minutes of downtime per year.

Topping its own security record, the new 16-way z990 can handle up to 11,000 Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) transactions/second (a 57% improvement over a 16-way z900). SSL handshakes -- those that cause the "locked" padlock icon to appear at the bottom of browsers -- are crucial to e-business transactions, enabling companies to more securely process orders on-line. The ability to process greater numbers of SSL transactions helps businesses serve more customers and make more sales in less time.

For customers seeking additional connectivity for new e-business workloads on the mainframe, the new z990 provides up to 512 I/O channels, double the number of its predecessor. In addition, there are now up to 16 HiperSockets, which provide high speed TCP/IP connectivity between virtual servers within a single z990, quadruple the number in the z900. IBM has also introduced a new technology called logical channel subsystems, which can make it easier for customers to consolidate multiple mainframes into a larger z990.

The z990 has available up to four times the memory of the z900, 256GB versus 64GB.