Well well, it was a very sad and strange week here in France after all that happened with the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Everything else doesn't matter anymore and still the irony is that most things keep continuing as if nothing happened. My direct colleagues here in the Montpellier Client Centre and myself feel very sad and upset, still we have been very busy in the preparation of the announcement last Wednesday of the new mainframe.
Since this is a column on IT, I will continue writing about it, although it is with pain in my heart and a tear in either eye...
So, what's new? Well to start with a trivial one: IBM decided to change the naming of the mainframe. The name IBM System z isn't used anymore. We have re-branded it into...... IBM z Systems. Quite a shock, isn't it?
I don't know how much we paid a renowned marketing company to come up with this brilliant new name (probably more than many of us earn in a year) but hey, that's the way it is. Despite the many names we've come up with, most of the customers just keep calling the system 'mainframe', no matter what IBM is calling it.
The big news is that we've come up with the latest and greatest in the mainframe product line: IBM z13. For me, I was very surprised that our American friends dared to use '13' in a product name. As you know there is no row 13 in airplanes, no 13th floor in hotels, but the spin doctors of the IBM's naming department were very bold to just name the system z13. And, after its predecessor the IBM EC12 and BC12, it makes sense. (EC was short for Enterprise Class, and the BC stood for Business Class)
Let's take one step back and look over the mainframe from an enterprise point of view. Basically, the world can't function without a mainframe. 90% of the Fortune 500 companies use mainframes. 70% of the worlds enterprise data touches a mainframe. And in every single second, all the mainframes around the world handle 2 to 3 million transactions. Flawlessly.
It has been around for more than 50 years now, which in itself is rather unique, and there is no reason to believe it will disappear any time soon.
As business requirements change, the mainframe changes. We are now in the CAMS(S) area: Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, Security and Social. So the new IBM z13 is designed to handle that with mind blowing specs, but also with design principals.
Cloud may raise an eyebrow or two, for the mainframe might not be associated with cloud at a first glance, but nothing is further from the truth. Looking at the cloud landscape the enterprises are surely adopting cloud, but in a hybrid way. The on-premise systems need to interact with the cloud-based system. To do this, the IBM z13 has adopted the OpenStack specifications and can therefore be integrated with IBM's BlueMix and other cloud environments like Google. In addition it can run up to 8000 virtual servers, neatly fitting into a hybrid cloud environment.
Analytics is another magic IT word that pops up very frequently and yes, analytics and the mainframe are indeed very much integrated. With addressable memory of 10TB and up to 20% faster database access because of the I/O and other design enhancements, the IBM z13 makes it possible to do what we call 'in-line' analytics. This means that we don't (necessarily) have to store the data to analyse it later, but that we can analyse millions of transactions as they happen. You can imaging that for fraud detection this makes more sense to prevent a smelly transaction than dealing with it once its already happened.
As you might know, I've spent nearly the last two years of my IBM life on Mobile on the mainframe, which again, might not be the first combination to think of. Still, the press commentators have highlighted that the IBM z13 is the system to handle mobile workloads. And it does. With mind blowing technical specs, it can handle millions of transactions a day, and those transactions are coming more and more from mobile devices. Not only should the system handle that many requests flawlessly, but they also have to be fast and secure.
Security, of course, has always been one of the strongest pillars of the mainframe. It has never been hacked, data on the mainframe is secure. Period. In the new IBM z13 security is even more enhanced with cryptographic capabilities to handle more and faster secured transactions.
So, after a difficult and emotional week, I'm proud of the new IBM z13. We have one already in our Montpellier DataCenter and when I admired it yesterday I could here it humming. I took a step closer and I listened very carefully, put my ear against the housing and I could swear that I heard it humming:
Zje zjuis Zarlie.