The shipments of the high-end boxes as well as support for advanced cryptographical software for the boxes should significantly boost IBM’s Systems Group’s prospects for increased sales and profits in the fourth quarter.
The T-Rex machines are by far the most powerful mainframe servers IBM has ever offered, with the 32-way version of T-Rex providing over 9,000 MIPS of processing capacity. The company has even larger mainframes in store for 2004, but for now, these big boxes are going to be enough to meet the needs of the big banking, insurance, and financial services companies who want to consolidate their mainframe applications and maybe even their Wintel and Unix infrastructure applications onto the zSeries mainframe platform.
The zSeries 990 uses the G8 64-bit mainframe processors, which have a clock speed of 1.2GHz and which deliver somewhere between 465 MIPS and 485 MIPS apiece, depending on whose estimates you use.
The prior generation of G7 Turbo processors ran at 770MHz and delivered about 300 MIPS.
That extra processing power can be brought to bear to speed up the monolithic, mono-threaded big batch jobs that are the hallmark of the IBM mainframe, and can also be used to speed up online transaction processing response times.
While the prior generation of G7 mainframes, code-named Freeway and sold as the zSeries 900, only spanned 16 processors in a single system image using symmetric multiprocessing, the T-Rex machines will eventually put 64 processors in a single system and the z/OS operating system will eventually support up to 48 processors in a single system image, perhaps delivering as much as 13,000 MIPS.
What makes this possible is not just the faster processors, but also the fact that system I/O bandwidth has been nearly quadrupled, from 24GB/sec in the Freeways to 96GB/sec, and main memory has also been quadrupled to 256GB in the T-Rex machine, up from 64GB in the Freeways.
There are four zSeries 990 models that are currently being sold. The zSeries 990 Model A08 has eight active processors, while the Model B16 has sixteen active processors. Both of these machines support up to 15 logical partitions and have one channel subsystem. The zSeries 990 C24 and D32 models have 24 and 32 active processors; they have two channel subsystems and will support up to 30 z/OS logical partitions.
A base Model A08 has one processor book package (which includes up to 12 processors, with four of them that can be activated to run real work, as well as main memory and I/O channels) and costs about $1 million. That works out to over $2,000 per MIPS. A big 32-way T-Rex machine costs about $15 million, according to IBM sources, which is about $1,600 to $1,700 per MIPS. When you do the math, a mainframe processor costs about $450,000 a pop when it is activated to run IBM’s z/OS operating system. IBM charges $120,000 per processor on the T-Rex box to activate that processor to run Linux instances.
IBM yesterday has also rolled out a new type of expert to support its enterprise customers called an IBM Systems Architect. These SAs, who will be distinct from IBM’s Systems Engineers (SEs) and Certified Engineers (CEs), will be trying to drive the adoption of mainframes, blade servers, grid technology, and Linux that are central to the Infrastructure Simplification theme that IBM’s zSeries unit has developed to push products into big midrange and enterprise shops that have mainframes and who also have a lot of other kinds of servers running their applications.
The company claims to have over 1,000 tech support people dedicated to the zSeries platform and over 20 design centers around the world that are provided through the Systems Group at a cost of $250 million a year to help companies implement applications on the zSeries.
Now, 150 of these people have had supplemental training to become experts in helping customers add blade servers, Linux instances, and grid technology to their mainframe shops to save money and boost the efficiency of their operations.
IBM is also running a z990 On Demand promotional offering. Under that deal, customers who activate a G8 processor can get a rebate of $20,000 on base G8 processors and $25,000 on the Turbo versions of the G8 processors. This rebate is capped at a maximum of $250,000 (on a five-way D32 machine). That money can be used to buy WebSphere middleware, DB2 for mainframe Linux, Shark storage arrays and their Remote Copy software, and BladeCenter blade servers.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
