IBM Adds Mainframes With Up to 32 CPUs

IDG News Service - San Francisco—The mainframe may be a dinosaur, but it's a carnivorous one. That was IBM's message last week when it launched a new mainframe line code-named T-Rex that is capable of supporting up to 32 processors—twice what the company's current systems can handle.

IBM said the z990 models are built around a 16-chip processing module that helps provide a nearly threefold performance improvement over its z900 machines. With 512 I/O channels, the z990 also has twice the I/O capability of existing mainframes, according to IBM.

As part of the z990 rollout, IBM said it will reduce the number of its mainframe offerings from 42 to four. The first two z990s are scheduled to become available on June 16 and will support eight and 16 processors. Models that can accommodate 24 and 32 CPUs are due in October.

In September, IBM plans to release capacity-on-demand functionality and pricing for the new mainframes that will let users turn processing engines on or off as their computing workloads change.

"The on-demand aspect is really a step in a good direction," said Fred Betito, a director in the IT architecture group at Levi Strauss & Co. "Being able to just, over the phone, increase your capacity is something that is of great value."

Betito said that San Francisco-based Levi Strauss recently switched from Unix servers to a z900 mainframe to run the databases that support its SAP back-office applications.

The z990 is the result of four years of development work, done at a cost of more than $1 billion, said William Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM's Systems Group. Zeitler said IBM has added more than 100 mainframe users since the start of last year, and he claimed that 70% of overall zSeries sales are coming from customers running new types of workloads, such as using Linux to consolidate servers on mainframes.

Harry Roberts, CIO at Boscov's Department Store LLC, said the Reading, Pa.-based company has found the mainframe to be an ideal platform for server consolidation. Boscov's cut its 90-system server farm in half by transferring applications to Linux partitions on a z900, he said.

The z990 promises even better performance for Linux-based applications, Roberts said. "This isn't the mainframe of our youth," he noted. "This is a flexible, sophisticated enterprise computing platform."

Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., said IBM's mainframe business has gotten a boost from its recent success with Linux, which the company claims accounted for 17% of its $3 billion in zSeries sales last year.

The z990 rollout furthers IBM's attempt to convince users that mainframes are still a relevant data center technology, Haff added. "IBM's making a real effort to introduce this as something that fits into the server line as a whole and isn't arcane," he said.