Where do the tablets go?

Posted by Trevor Eddolls on Saturday, July 2, 2011 - 214 views

So, your organization has a mainframe – had one for years – and everything is nicely locked down. You can recover almost up to the minute the system or subsystem crashed (which it hardly ever does), and you’ve got people who seem to know, almost by instinct these days, when something isn’t performing quite right.

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Buyer’s guide to IT infrastructure

Posted by Mike on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - 179 views

Best practice in datacentre design dictates that as much IT infrastructure as possible should be virtualised. Doing so improves agility, allowing the IT department to flex resources up and down to meet the demands of the business.

Given that virtualisation is happening, IT departments have a choice: roll out a scale-out architecture using a large volume of x86 servers to run virtual machines, or deploy a scale-up architecture, comprising fewer much larger, and often more expensive, Unix and Linux server boxes over commodity Windows hardware.

IBM’s new z/196 mainframe aims to tackle datacentre complexity by pulling together different applications, or workloads, in a single system. The system comprises a mainframe and Power and x86 blades, which enables the datacentre to run mainframe, Aix and Linux applications in the same floor space.

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IBM Describes Fastest Microprocessor Ever

Posted by Mike on Thursday, August 26, 2010 - 152 views

PALO ALTO–IBM revealed more details of its 5.2-GHz chip on Tuesday, the fastest microprocessor ever announced. Don’t bet that you’ll ever be able to buy it, though.

At the Hot Chips 2010 conference here, IBM executives described the z196, which will power its Z-series of mainframes, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not over a million. IBM will ship the chip in September, said Brian Curran, an IBM distinguished engineer. The mainframe itself was announced in July.

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Mainframes and Clouds

Posted by Mike on Monday, August 2, 2010 - 308 views

On July 22, I attended IBM’s announcement of its new generation of mainframes, the zEnterprise System in New York City. As you would expect with any product announcement, this new mainframe is significantly better and faster than its predecessors. The new z196 platform has better and faster processors, more processors per box and offers significantly greater energy efficiency.

But, what I found most compelling about the announcement, is its role in the continuing re-invention and evolution of the mainframe, which was first announced as S/360 in 1964. With this announcement, IBM is positioning the mainframe as an architecture for integrating and managing heterogeneous systems in the data center, not just platforms based on the z processor architecture, the descendant of the original S/360.

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