System z Solution Edition for Application Development

The primary goal of this Application Development solution is to make mainframe deployment of new workloads affordable, simple and accessible to application developers while at the same time, facilitating a development environment that is consistent with distributed platforms.

System z has become well known for minimizing costs for new workloads with its superior operations model. The operations focusing around business resilience, security, capacity management, business process integration and storage management. Think of this as the interstate highway or motorway of modern computing. In a similar vein, Rational has been providing a set of development tools, known as the Rational Developers Toolkit for System z that provides a consistent set of tools, built on an eclipse.org foundation to speed deployment and simplify the maintenance and development of new workloads on System z. Think of this as the on ramp toward that highway. The problem is, there is a significant toll on the highway today. All processing capacity used on the mainframe is considered production processing and as a result isn't price competitive with x86 and UNIX development environments at all.

This System z Solution Edition for Application Development is intended to dramatically change the pricing for the development environment on z. This solution is delivered with a System z10 BC processor with enough capacity to satisfy a group of individual developers; zVM to enable each developer to have a mainframe image accessible from their desktop; and z/OS and all the middleware and compiler capabilities to successfully build and function test an application that is in development. An IT organization can install the IBM software at which point each developer can bring up and modify their own system image as desired, much as they would do on their own PC for testing.

This offering doesn't come with Rational Developer for System z (RDz), which is offered on Windows based desktops to create and manage new application deployment. Rational Developer for System z is not part of the offering at this time. However the offering is compatible with RDz as the Application Development solution provides all the back end mainframe capabilities to make System z a viable and productive target for developers and architects.