Specifically designed for the mobile app economy, IBM has unveiled the result of 5 years hard work and a $1 billion investment – the z13 mainframe.
Claimed by the company to be the most sophisticated computer system ever built, the z13 is able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day – equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year.
Adding assurance as mobile transactions grow, z13 transactions are persistent, protected and auditable from end-to-end.
Encryption technologies have been doubled by the z13, the first system to achieve such a feat. Ensuring faster and safer mobile transactions, z13 speeds real-time encryption of mobile transactions to help protect the transaction data and ensure response times meet the expectations of the customer.
The z13 is also the first mainframe system to offer embedded analytics providing real-time insights on all transactions, boasting 17X the speed of any other method currently available.
This capability, IBM claim, helps guarantee real-time fraud detection on 100% of business transactions.
Support for Hadoop enables unstructured data to be analysed in the system. Other analytics features include faster acceleration of queries by adding DB2 BLU for Linux, enhancements to the IBM DB2 analytics accelerator, and vastly improved performance for mathematically intense analytics workloads.
IBM’s claim of the z13 being the most sophisticated computer system ever built is justified when looking under the hood of the mainframe.
The z13 features the world’s fastest microprocessor, 2X faster than the most common server processors, 300% more memory, and 100% more bandwidth and vector processing analytics to speed mobile transactions.
"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. The z13 is designed to handle billions of transactions for the mobile economy. Only the IBM mainframe can put the power of the world’s most secure datacenters in the palm of your hand," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems.
"Consumers expect fast, easy and secure mobile transactions. The implication for business is the creation of a secure, high performance infrastructure with sophisticated analytics."
71% of CIOs and IT managers surveyed by IBM indicated that security is their most significant mobile enterprise challenge. With that in mind, z13 can be combined with IBM MobileFirst solutions to not only deliver enhanced security, but also enhanced performance, availability and analytics.
The mainframe also looks to the cloud, with the z13 capable of running up to 8,000 virtual servers — more than 50 virtual servers per core allowing for lower software, energy and facilities costs.
IBM claim that the cost of running cloud on the mainframe is cut to almost half the cost of running cloud on an x86/distributed server environment, while boosting performance by up to 30%. z13 is based on open standards, fully supporting Linux and OpenStack.
Read our exclusive E-zine and discover more about System Z…the platform for the modern world here.
