HPCwire: IBM Unleashes New z9 Mainframe

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July 29, 2005

IBM Unleashes New z9 Mainframe

IBM introduced a highly sophisticated system, the IBM System z9 mainframe, with security and virtualization capabilities that the company said can enable it to act as the hub in a new era of collaborative computing.

Representing a three-year, $1.2-billion-development effort encompassing 5,000 IBM engineers, software developers, technology professionals and security experts from around the world -- the System z9 was designed to be one of the most open, reliable and secure computing systems ever built for business. It is designed to:

process one billion transactions per day, more than double the performance of its predecessor, the "T-Rex" zSeries z990 mainframe, at its launch.
enable businesses to safely transport encrypted data to partners, suppliers, and remote or archive sites -- helping to protect data in the event of media loss or inadvertent compromise. This function is planned to be available by the end of 2005.
run five world-class operating systems including Linux and the mainframe's new flagship z/OS version 1.7, which can enable transport of data in a security-rich environment between multiple computing platforms and virtualization of hundreds of applications, including Java-based applications.
process up to 6,000 secure online handshakes per second -- approximately three times as many as before -- which may help businesses better serve e-commerce customers and process more sales quicker. (3)
resist known security threats.

At a news conference this week in New York, IBM executives unveiled the System z9 system and said this is the first of a new generation of mainframes whose role can be to facilitate management security and systems resources across the entire corporate IT network. In this way, the mainframe is designed to provide a central point of control.

"The System z9 delivers virtualization and collaborative capabilities on a level never before seen in the computer industry. A single System z9 is designed to optimize hardware, networking and software so that businesses can manage and secure workloads equivalent to hundreds of distributed servers in a fraction of the space," said Bill Zeitler, senior vice-president and group executive, IBM Systems and Technology. "This is the beginning of a new era -- in which businesses can gain control of information technology by managing it from the inside out."

The heart of the z9 is the IBM multichip module (MCM) -- a dense and advanced semiconductor and packaging technology. The newly designed 3.74" x 3.74" x 0.33" (95 x 95 x 8.5mm) module, which fits in the palm of your hand, contains 16 chips mounted on 102 layers of ceramic glass connected to over 5,184 I/Os pins by 540 meters of wire. The module uses IBM's leading-edge 90nm copper and Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology and contains over 3.5 billion transistors. Manufactured by IBM's world-class chip developers in, East Fishkill N.Y., this leading-edge technology provides advantages in performance, power consumption and reliability.

Model Specifications and Availability

The System z9 109 (z9-109) has five available models offering between 1 and 54 configurable processor units. The first four models with 1 to 38 processor units, are planned to be available in September 2005, and the high-capacity model S54 is planned to be available November 2005. The performance of the System z9 109 uni-processor is expected to be 1.35 times the z900 uni-processor. The z9-109 is expected to scale from a one to 54-way (versus 32-way on the z990) with up to 512 gigabites of memory.

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