zEnterprise System

Highlights

• One of the industry’s fastest and most scalable and flexible enterprise server
• Improved performance for traditional and modern workloads
• Virtualisation to enable virtually limitless capacity for massive consolidation and infrastructure simplification
• Enhance security with support for ECC technology which is ideal for constrained environments such as mobile devices
• Sixty percent more capacity with the same energy footprint as a z10 EC, plus options for water cooling and high voltage DC power for greater energy efficiency.

At the core of the zEnterprise System is the next generation mainframe – the zEnterprise 196 (z196) – one of the industry’s fastest and most scalable enterprise system. To support a workload optimised system, the z196 can scale up (over 52,000 millions of instructions per second (MIPS) in a single footprint), scale out (80 configurable cores) and scale within (specialty engines, cryptographic processors, hypervisors) executing in an environmentally friendly footprint. And the z196 is designed to work together with system software, middleware and storage to be the most robust and cost effective data server. The z196 offers an industry standard PCIe I/O drawer for FICON and OSA-Express multimode and single mode fibre optic environments for increased capacity, infrastructure bandwidth and reliability.

The z196 offers a total of 96 cores running at an astonishing 5.2 GHz and delivering up to 40 percent improvement in performance per core and up to 60 percent increase in total capacity for z/OS, z/VM and Linux on System z workloads compared to its predecessor, the z10 EC. The z196 has up to 80 configurable cores for client use. The cores can be configured as general purpose processors (CPs), IFLs, zAAPs, zIIPs, additional SAPs, ICFs or used as additional spares.

This design, with increased capacity and number of available processor cores per server and reduced energy usage and floor space, makes the z196 a perfect fit for large-scale consolidation. The virtualisation capabilities can support up to 47 distributed servers on a single core, up to thousands on a single system.

System z security is one of the many reasons why some of the world’s top banks and retailers rely on the IBM mainframe to help secure sensitive business transactions. Support for the next generation of public key technologies is available with ECC. ECC is ideal for constrained environments such as mobile devices. The z196 also offers support for key ANSI and ISO standards for the banking and finance industry. The z196 has received the Common Criteria EAL5+ certification for security of LPARs.

As environmental concerns raise the focus on energy consumption, z196 offers a holistic focus on the environment. New efficiencies enable a dramatic reduction of energy usage and floor space when consolidating workloads from distributed servers. For organisations looking to build green data centres, optional water cooling and high voltage DC power allow a bold step into the future of cooler computing without changing the footprint.