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IBM on Thursday announced the zEnterprise mainframe server and a new systems design
that allow workloads on mainframe, POWER7 and System x servers to share resources and
be managed as a single, virtualized system. The company said that the new mainframe is
most powerful and energy efficient mainframe ever.
It gives us profound performance improvements. It's going to deliver us 50 BIPs of 50 billion
instructions a second. So it's fantastic performance and a great improvement over the last system
Z environment.
The system, which can have as many as 96 processors, will support up to 114 blades with eight cores.
In terms of hardware capability alone, the zEnterprise 196 -- that's IBM's name for just
the server itself -- includes a 5.2-GHz quad processor and up to 3TB of memory. That's
double the memory of the preceding system, the z10.
The latest zEnterprise system is built around an IBM-centric approach that requires IBM
zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension and a Unified Resources Manager
This is about taking that rigor we have on the mainframe and all of that management rigor
that we have and allowing the customer to apply that same rigor to all of his data center,
not just the Z part of his data centers.
Brad Day, an analyst at Forrester Research, called the new system "very different from
anything that has happened before," and a "real departure."
Day believes that IBM's approach is to focus on consolidation and virtualization, especially
as it sees a lot of its MIPS growth coming from users who are running Linux on the mainframe.
With reporting by Patrick Thibodeau at Computerworld, I'm Nick Barber, IDG News Service.