European IT provider, Computacenter has partnered with IBM to deliver a new IT solution to the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service.
IBM and Computacenter provide a scalable mainframe upgrade, which the Met Office had already previously partnered with Computacenter for.
Due to a good response, Computacenter was selected again to assist with the latest project. The mainframe upgrade enables the Met Office to process greater volumes of weather data in a shorter time frame.
The new environment, including two mainframes with a total of 44 cores and 200 terabytes of attached storage, will be able to perform over 23,000 trillion calculations per second.
The two mainframes that the new platform is based on are IBM’s z13 LinuxOne and its IBM hybrid storage systems. It will also include IBM Wave for virtual server management in the future.
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The Met Office plans to migrate a number of additional applications, open source databases and workloads to the new environment. This will include its file transfer hubs that are currently hosted on disparate server clusters.
Martyn Hunt, Technical Lead, Met Office Mainframe said: “Computacenter is an important IT partner for the Met Office. They understand our unique requirements and have a strong relationship with IBM.
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“Any issues with performance can have a direct impact on the availability of the services we provide. Without accurate and timely weather information, everything from commercial flight schedules to emergency rescue operations can be disrupted.”
Computacenter helped design a solution for the Met Office that can support new applications and digitalisation initiatives, with added scale to meet future demand.
The new mainframe will help power a range of public forecasting services, commercial products and mobile apps at a time of increased demand for weather intelligence.
It has over 35 percent additional mainframe capacity, with an increase in operational agility and efficiency that rounds up the upgrade with a reduced total cost of ownership.
