IBM touts new mainframe as 'most powerful' business system yet
Sparing no superlatives, vendor also describes System z10 as a 'commercial supercomputer'
Computerworld - NEW YORK — IBM is calling its new System z10 mainframe a "commercial supercomputer" and hoping that the machine can capture some geek mind share via features such as a quad-core processor that runs at a clock speed 2.6 times faster than the chips in IBM's z9 model could manage.
The z10, which was announced today and displayed on the stage of a downtown hotel here, is sleek black in color and imperial in stature at a height of 80 inches and a maximum weight of 5,000-plus pounds.
And the system certainly has its ooh-and-ahh elements, including its 4.4-GHz quad-core processor. That compares with the 1.7-GHz single-core processor used in the three-year-old z9. The new system also supports up to 1.5TB of available memory per system and InfiniBand data rates of up to 6GB/sec., more than two times faster than on the z9.
According to IBM, the z10 is designed to run up to 50% faster than the z9 overall and can deliver as much as twice the performance of the existing model on CPU-intensive applications. "This is the world's most powerful enterprise computer," said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM's software unit.
IBM officials took a shotgun approach in their characterizations of the z10, which also was described as a "universal server" at one point. But an issue for the mainframe line remains its upfront cost. The low-end z10 model starts at something less than $1 million, while a fully loaded model with 64 physical processors can cost in the multiple millions.
When IBM released the z9, a major emphasis for that system was security, encryption and other capabilities for maintaining data integrity. With the z10, a key component of IBM's economic justification for investing in new mainframes appears to be their ability to help IT managers solve a problem increasingly cited as a top data center concern: server sprawl, and the power and cooling issues it presents.
"We are about to hit a wall," said Rod Adkins, senior vice president of development and manufacturing in IBM's systems and technology group. "Companies will either have the opportunity to expand their data centers or innovate within an existing data center envelope."
IBM claims that the z10 can sweep a data center floor of hundreds of x86 servers if companies utilize its virtualized environment.
One z9 user, Buzz Woeckener, an IT manager at Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co.'s shared-services unit, said that he runs 484 virtualized servers on his mainframe. As a result, the unit has been able to delay until 2010 a planned data center expansion that initially was expected in 2006 or 2007. "It significantly pushed out that major investment," Woeckener said.



- Excel 2010 Cheat Sheet
- Register for this Computerworld Insider Cheat Sheet and gain access to hundreds of premium content articles, guides, product reviews and more.
- Overcome Top 7 Admin Challenges of Active Directory
- As Active Directory's role in the enterprise has drastically increased, so has the need to secure the data. Gain insight on creating repeatable,...
- Insiders Can Ruin Your Company. Take Action.
- Did you know that 80 percent of threats to an organization come from the inside? The threat from insiders is often overlooked in...
- Top Solutions and Tools to Prevent Devastating Malware
- Custom malware frequently goes undetected. According to Forrester Research, the best way to reduce risk of breach is to deploy file integrity monitoring...
- Streamline Compliance and Increase ROI
- Streamline, simplify, and automate compliance related activities; especially those that impact multiple business units. This white paper from NetIQ, outlines solutions that will...
- X-Ray of the PCI Process-4 Proactive Steps
- This white paper from Forrester Research Inc., helps break PCI into understandable components. Security and risk professionals will gain knowledge and insight into... All Mainframes and Supercomputers White Papers
- Optimizing Networks for the Cloud
- Join guest speaker, Rohit Mehra, IDC Director of Enterprise Communications Infrastructure, to explore current trends, discuss best practices for optimizing Data Center and...
- Apps QuickStart Series Part 2: Designing and Deploying SQL Server on VMware vSphere
- Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as...
- Apps QuickStart Series Part 1: Designing and Deploying Exchange 2010 on VMware vSphere
- Download this webcast to learn the virtual hardware design considerations for Exchange 2010, deployment using the building block approach, options for high-availability and...
- Customer Spotlight: How IPC The Hospitalist Company Implemented Oracle on VMware
- Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn...
- Virtualize Business-Critical Applications with Confidence
- Virtualizing business-critical applications has become a key focus for organizations as they move along their virtualization journey. With the launch of VMware vSphere®... All Mainframes and Supercomputers Webcasts