IBM
Celebrates Mainframe’s 40th Birthday
With New
Mainframes
This week industry veterans and IBM
marked the 40th anniversary of IBM’s System/360
Mainframe. In 1964, the
product was the most sophisticated product of its time and changed
both computing and business, providing a platform for the
introduction of still- important technologies, including transaction
processing, micro-circuitry, and data bases.
In 1964, IBM marked the System/360’s
introduction by presenting it to over 100,000 business people, the
largest introduction for a business product that had ever occurred.
For years, competitors and pundits have
predicted the imminent extinction of the mainframe, frequently
referring to it as a dinosaur. But while total revenue from mainframe sales contracted as
high-end UNIX servers grew in popularity (including some from IBM),
mainframes continued to be an important component of big
companies’ IT plans. In
fact, last year, mainframe sales were up significantly (6%) to $4.2
billion.
This week, IBM celebrated the
System/360’s 40th anniversary with a party at the
Computer History Museum in San Jose, CA and the introduction of new
mainframe products.
The
new products include a mainframe for medium-sized enterprise
customers (zSeries 890), extending the capabilities of IBM’s
flagship eServer zSeries 990 mainframe to mid-sized companies at a
lower entry cost and size, together with a matching storage server (TotalStorage
Enterprise Storage Server 750). These products will be aggressively priced, with some
configurations of the Storage Server 750 as low as $125,000 and the
z890 comparably priced.
The z890 is based on z990 technology.
This allows it to offer 28 capacity levels, ranging from a
size 30% smaller in capacity than its predecessor, the z800, and up
to two times the z800’s capacity at its upper end, allowing
customers to more closely match server capacity with individual
business requirements. Both the new z890 and the z990 employ a
number of new technologies which enhance the execution of Java web
applications, increase overall system productivity, enhance on/off
capacity on demand (CoD) to offer scalability to respond to surges
in demand, and improved networking. The new storage system includes
more than 20 autonomic features to improve performance and storage
administrator productivity as well as features that support
non-disruptive upgrades, enhanced performance, and business
continuity.
IBM will also provide new versions of the z/OS
operating system as well as a new version of z/VM.
a new version of z/VSE is also being previewed.
IBM will also offer migration services for z Series Software
tools to assist customers in all aspects of moving from non-IBM
products to the new zSeries systems.
The new z Series systems are
available May 28 and the new z/OS operating system will be available
in September. The new
storage server is also available in May. Information on IBM eServer
is available at http://www.ibm.com/eserver.
IBM news releases and fact sheets are available at http://www.ibm.com
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