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On September 4, the System z9 Business Class joined the ranks of IBM servers that have achieved Common Criteria Security Certification - Evaluation Assurance Level 5. The System z™ architecture is designed to prevent the flow of information among logical partitions on a system, thus helping to ensure that confidential or sensitive data remains within the boundaries of a single partition.
The IBM eServer System z 900 was the first server to receive the Common Criteria EAL5 certification level (evaluation assurance level 5) for the security of its logical partitions. The other System z servers soon followed; the z800 achieved this prestigious recognition in June of 2003, followed by the z990 and the z890 which achieved EAL5 in May of 2005 and the z9 Enterprise Class which achieved EAL5 on March 24, 2006. Now the System z9 BC, introduced in April of 2006, has met the certification requirements to achieve EAL5 for LPAR isolation. The logical partitioning technology on System z servers was evaluated against the Common Criteria standard ISO 15408 which is widely recognized in the global IT market. System z servers are currently* the only servers to have been awarded this prestigious assurance level for partitioning.
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This evaluation demonstrates that the System z server can be an essential building block for server consolidation and the integration of e-business applications and traditional corporate workloads on a single server. It provides a high degree of assurance that PR/SM can be configured and used in environments where separation of workloads is a requirement, but where the use of a single hardware platform is desirable for reasons of economy, flexibility, security, or management. PR/SM is designed to prevent the flow of information among logical processor partitions, providing highly secure isolation. This isolation allows images of System z supported operating systems, including z/OS, z/VM and Linux for System z, to run in different logical partitions on a single System z server.
The need for security certification is no longer restricted to governments. With the explosion of Internet technology and e-business, commercial users are now increasingly concerned with security issues and they frequently demand that their systems have security certifications similar to those of governments.
For more on the Common Criteria see http://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/
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