IBM has unveiled the most powerful mainframe server ever, the zEnterprise, that it claims will fundamentally change the way firms like banks manage data centres, enabling centralised management of disparate application silos.
The zEnterprise mainframe server and a new systems design allows workloads on mainframe, Power7 and System x servers to share resources and be managed as a single, virtualised system, says Big Blue.
The firm has invested more than $1.5 billion over three years on the new generation tech it hopes will address an important issue for corporate data centres - the jumble of disparate technologies added over time to run specific applications and which operate in silos, sometimes unable to communicate with each other in real time and requiring separate staff and software tools to manage.
This long-standing challenge for data centre ops executives is aggravated by dramatic increases in cost and complexity amid a rising tide of complex, data-intensive workloads.
IBM says a financial services company managing credit card transactions on the mainframe using an IBM blade optimised for analytics can now gain insights from the information in seconds whereas previously, it would have taken hours for the two disparate systems to integrate their databases.
Martin Kennedy, MD, enterprise system infrastructure, Citi, says: "The new IBM zEnterprise System represents a potentially revolutionary change to the platform and the next phase in the evolution of highly efficient, scalable processing opening up the possibility of hosting entire workloads on a single highly integrated system."
By enabling companies to manage workloads across systems as one, the zEnterprise System can drive up to 40% lower acquisition costs and reduce cost of ownership by 55%, says the vendor while also helping to make significant energy savings.
"As one of America's greenest banks we plan to take full advantage of the additional capacity and advanced power and cooling capabilities unique to zEnterprise. Citi's unified technology decision making model and its recent efforts to gain efficiencies prepared us to invest in these innovative technologies that benefit our clients," concludes Kennedy.