Innovation

The IBM System z10TM processor chip and the servers that use it

The IBM System z10 Enterprise Class (z10 ECTM) and the IBM System z10 Business Class (z10 BCTM) are the culmination of five years work by the IBM Corporation. The project included five thousand people around the world. It stands out as a premiere IBM innovation. Most importantly, the Sysetm z10 reflects a very close, long standing collaboration with our clients who have defined this platform over decades. The clients who use this platform are the most sophisticated and demanding users of IT in business and government in the world. The System z10 is designed from the ground up for business value.

The heart of the System z10 is our new System z10 Processor chip, the most significant new design in over 10 years, increasing the frequency (and speed) on the chip for the z10TM EC to 4.4 GHz from 1.7 GHz on the IBM System z9® Enterprise Class (z9™ EC) and 3.5 GHz on the z10 BC from 1.4 GHz on the IBM System z9 Business Class (z9 BC). Using the z10 processor chip, we’ve seen up to two times performance increase in CPU intensive jobs and up to 10 times improvement in decimal floating point instructions. This chip is a world leading combination of processors and connections to high speed storage that allows the System z10 to process billions of instructions per second, driving business transactions throughout the world.

The entry model z10 BC starts at just 26 MIPS and can scale up to 54% more capacity than the z9 BC, and the largest System z10 EC scales up to a 64-way, providing 70%¹ more capacity than the largest z9 EC. To help you size a server that fits your needs, IBM provides a free tool that reflects the latest IBM LSPR measurements - the IBM Processor Capacity Reference (zPCR). And of course with System z® investment protection, the z10 BC is upgradeable to the z10 EC so your server can grow as your business grows with mergers, acquisitions or appliciation changes. And because many new applications require more memory for responsiveness, both the servers offer more memory than in the past ... the z10 BC was designed to allow up to 248 GB and the the z10 EC was designed to allow up to 1.5 TB of memory. Based on your business requirments, the capacity boost and increased memory help the System z10 servers be able to establish the mainframe as your consolidation platform of choice – offering both the required technology and remarkable cost advantages which are seen in a comparison to distributed server environments. An example is allowing clients to reduce costs by having fewer software licenses after consolidating CPU intensive workloads. By deploying on IBM System z10, applications can take advantage of the core strengths of the platform - security, reliability, availability.

The System z10 servers introduced a new just-in-time deployment of capacity resources designed to provide more flexibility to dynamically change capacity when business requirements change. You are no longer limited by one offering configuration; instead you can define one or more flexible configurations that can be used to solve multiple temporary situations. You can now have multiple configurations active at once and the configurations themselves are flexible so you can activate only what is needed from your defined configuration. As long as your total System z10 infrastructure can support the maximums that are defined, they can be delivered. A significant change is the ability to add permanent capacity to the server when you are in a temporary state. The combinations of these updates, and the fact that you can preload them all to your machine so no interaction with IBM is needed when you want to activate, can change the way you think about on demand capacity.

High speed connectivity and high bandwidth out to the data and the network are critical in achieving high levels of transaction throughput and enabling resources inside and outside the server to maximize application requirements. The System z10 has a new host bus interface with a link data rate of 6 GB using the industry standard InfiniBand® protocol to help satisfy requirements for coupling (ICF and server-to-server connectivity), cryptography (Crypto Express2 with secure coprocessors and SSL transactions), I/O (ESCON®, FICON® or FCP) and LAN (new OSA-Express3 Gigabit, 10 Gigabit and 1000BASE-T Ethernet features). New High Performance FICON for System z (zHPF) also brings new levels of performance when accessing data on zHPF enabled storage devices such as the IBM System StorageTM DS8000TM.

IBM maintains a strong commitment to the mainframe and our new System z10 servers, the z10 EC and the z10 BC are just another proofpoint to that commitment.