IBM said today that it will develop two new supercomputers for the U.S. Department of Energy that are based on IBM’s new Power servers and will contain NVIDIA GPU accelerators and Mellanox networking technology. The new supercomputers, to be named Summit and Sierra, will be ready to roll in 2017; IBM will end up scoring a cool $325 million in government contracts for the project.
The Summit super computer will be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Sierra will be part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Both supercomputers are supposed to help the U.S. discover new ways to slow climate change, predict natural disasters, store nuclear waste and improve fuel efficiency.
IBM claimed that both supercomputers will be able to deliver in excess of 100 peak petaflops, which trumps current supercomputer reigning champs. Oak Ridge’s Titan supercomputer delivers 27 peak petaflops and China’s Tianhe-2, currently the fastest supercomputer in the world, delivers 55 peak petaflops.
The supercomputers are based on IBM’s OpenPower technology, which is managed by the OpenPower Foundation. The OpenPower tech is part of IBM’s efforts to cater to the webscale crowd that needs custom architecture to handle the kind of heavy duty workloads necessary for big-data tasks.
In early October, IBM unveiled a new server that contains both a Power8 processor and Nvidia’s GPU accelerator that IBM wants to sell to the “Linux-scale out market,” said Brad McCredie, an IBM fellow and vice president with IBM’s systems and technology group.
Predicting the next decade of tech: From the cloud to disappearing computers and the rise of robots
Summary: Making short-term decisions about technology investment is relatively easy; trying to work out how IT will develop over the next decade is much harder.
For an industry run according to logic and rationality, at least outwardly, the tech world seems to have a surprising weakness for hype and the 'next big thing'.
Perhaps that's because, unlike — say — in sales or HR, where innovation is defined by new management strategies, tech investment is very product driven. Buying a new piece of hardware or software often carries the potential for a 'disruptive' breakthrough in productivity or some other essential business metric. Tech suppliers therefore have a vested interest in promoting their products as vigorously as possible: the level of spending on marketing and customer acquisition by some fast-growing tech companies would turn many consumer brands green with envy.
As a result, CIOs are tempted by an ever-changing array of tech buzzwords (cloud, wearables and the Internet of Things [IoT] are prominent in the recent crop) through which they must sift in order to find the concepts that are a good fit for their organisations, and that match their budgets, timescales and appetite for risk. Short-term decisions are relatively straightforward, but the further you look ahead, the harder it becomes to predict the winners. Tech innovation in a one-to-three year timeframe
Despite all the temptations, the technologies that CIOs are looking at deploying in the near future are relatively uncontroversial — pretty safe bets, in fact. According to TechRepublic's own research, top CIO investment priorities over the next three years include security, mobile, big data and cloud. Fashionable technologies like 3D printing and wearables find themselves at the bottom of the list.
A separate survey from Deloitte reported similar findings: many of the technologies that CIOs are piloting and planning to implement in the near future are ones that have been around for quite some time — business analytics, mobile apps, social media and big data tools, for example. Augmented reality and gamification were seen as low-priority technologies.
This reflects the priorities of most CIOs, who tend to focus on reliability over disruption: in TechRepublic's research, 'protecting/securing networks and data' trumps 'changing business requirements' for understandably risk-wary tech chiefs.
Another major factor here is money: few CIOs have a big budget for bets on blue-skies innovation projects, even if they wanted to. (And many no doubt remember the excesses of the dotcom years, and are keen to avoid making that mistake again.)
According to the research by Deloitte, less than 10 percent of the tech budget is ring-fenced for technology innovation (and CIOs that do spend more on innovation tend to be in smaller, less conservative, companies). There's another complication in that CIOs increasingly don't control the budget dedicated to innovation, as this is handed onto other business units (such as marketing or digital) that are considered to have a more entrepreneurial outlook.
CIOs tend to blame their boss's conservative attitude to risk as the biggest constraint in making riskier IT investments for innovation and growth. Although CIOs claim to be willing to take risks with IT investments, this attitude does not appear to match up with their current project portfolios.
Another part of the problem is that it's very hard to measure the return on some of these technologies. Managers have been used to measuring the benefits of new technologies using a standard return-on-investment measure that tracks some very obvious costs — headcount or spending on new hardware, for example. But defining the return on a social media project or an IoT trial is much more slippery. Tech investment: A medium-term view
If CIO investment plans remain conservative and hobbled by a limited budget in the short term, you have to look a little further out to see where the next big thing in tech might come from.
One place to look is in what's probably the best-known set of predictions about the future of IT: Gartner's Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, which tries to assess the potential of new technologies while taking into account the expectations surrounding them.
The chart grades technologies not only by how far they are from mainstream adoption, but also on the level of hype surrounding them, and as such it demonstrates what the analysts argue is a fundamental truth: that we can't help getting excited about new technology, but that we also rapidly get turned off when we realize how hard it can be to deploy successfully. The exotically-named Peak of Inflated Expectations is commonly followed by the Trough of Disillusionment, before technologies finally make it up the Slope of Enlightenment to the Plateau of Productivity.
"It was a pattern we were seeing with pretty much all technologies — that up-and-down of expectations, disillusionment and eventual productivity," says Jackie Fenn, vice-president and Gartner fellow, who has been working on the project since the first hype cycle was published 20 years ago, which she says is an example of the human reaction to any novelty.
"It's not really about the technologies themselves, it's about how we respond to anything new. You see it with management trends, you see it with projects. I've had people tell me it applies to their personal lives — that pattern of the initial wave of enthusiasm, then the realisation that this is much harder than we thought, and then eventually coming to terms with what it takes to make something work." The 2014 Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. Image: GartnerAccording to Gartner's 2014 list, the technologies expected to reach the Plateau of Productivity, (where they become widely adopted) within the next two years include speech recognition and in-memory analytics.
Technologies that might take two to five years until mainstream adoption include 3D scanners, NFC and cloud computing. Cloud is currently entering Gartner's trough of disillusionment, where early enthusiasm is overtaken by the grim reality of making this stuff work: "there are many signs of fatigue, rampant cloudwashing and disillusionment (for example, highly visible failures)," Gartner notes.
When you look at a 5-10-year horizon, the predictions include virtual reality, cryptocurrencies and wearable user interfaces.
Working out when the technologies will make the grade, and thus how CIOs should time their investments, seems to be the biggest challenge. Several of the technologies on Gartner's first-ever hype curve back in 1995 — including speech recognition and virtual reality — are still on the 2014 hype curve without making it to primetime yet. The original 1995 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. Image: GartnerThese sorts of user interface technologies have taken a long time to mature, says Fenn. For example, voice recognition started to appear in very structured call centre applications, while the latest incarnation is something like Siri — "but it's still not a completely mainstream interface," she says.
Nearly all technologies go through the same rollercoaster ride, because our response to new concepts remains the same, says Fenn. "It's an innate psychological reaction — we get excited when there's something new. Partly it's the wiring of our brains that attracts us — we want to keep going around the first part of the cycle where new technologies are interesting and engaging; the second half tends to be the hard work, so it's easier to get distracted."
But even if they can't escape the hype cycle, CIOs can use concepts like this to manage their own impulses: if a company's investment strategy means it's consistently adopting new technologies when they are most hyped (remember a few years back when every CEO had to blog?) then it may be time to reassess, even if the CIO peer-pressure makes it difficult.
Says Fenn: "There is that pressure, that if you're not doing it you just don't get it — and it's a very real pressure. Look at where [new technology] adds value and if it really doesn't, then sometimes it's fine to be a later adopter and let others learn the hard lessons if it's something that's really not critical to you."
The trick, she says, is not to force-fit innovation, but to continually experiment and not always expect to be right.
Looking further out, the technologies labelled 'more than 10 years' to mainstream adoption on Gartner's hype cycle are the rather sci-fi-inflected ones: holographic displays, quantum computing and human augmentation. As such, it's a surprisingly entertaining romp through the relatively near future of technology, from the rather mundane to the completely exotic. "Employers will need to weigh the value of human augmentation against the growing capabilities of robot workers, particularly as robots may involve fewer ethical and legal minefields than augmentation," notes Gartner. Where the futurists roam
Beyond the 10-year horizon, you're very much into the realm where the tech futurists roam.
Steve Brown, a futurist at chip-maker Intel argues that three mega-trends will shape the future of computing over the next decade. "They are really simple — it's small, big and natural," he says.
'Small' is the consequence of Moore's Law, which will continue the trend towards small, low-power devices, making the rise of wearables and the IoT more likely. 'Big' refers to the ongoing growth in raw computing power, while 'natural' is the process by which everyday objects are imbued with some level of computing power.
"Computing was a destination: you had to go somewhere to compute — a room that had a giant whirring computer in it that you worshipped, and you were lucky to get in there. Then you had the era where you could carry computing with you," says Brown.
"The next era is where the computing just blends into the world around us, and once you can do that, and instrument the world, you can essentially make everything smart — you can turn anything into a computer. Once you do that, profoundly interesting things happen," argues Brown.
With this level of computing power comes a new set of problems for executives, says Brown. The challenge for CIOs and enterprise architects is that once they can make everything smart, what do they want to use it for? "In the future you have all these big philosophical questions that you have to answer before you make a deployment," he says.
Brown envisages a world of ubiquitous processing power, where robots are able to see and understand the world around them.
"Autonomous machines are going to change everything," he claims. "The challenge for enterprise is how humans will work alongside machines — whether that's a physical machine or an algorithm — and what's the best way to take a task and split it into the innately human piece and the bit that can be optimized in some way by being automated."
The pace of technological development is accelerating: where we used to have a decade to make these decisions, these things are going to hit us faster and faster, argues Brown. All of which means we need to make better decisions about how to use new technology — and will face harder questions about privacy and security.
"If we use this technology, will it make us better humans? Which means we all have to decide ahead of time what do we consider to be better humans? At the enterprise level, what do we stand for? How do we want to do business?". Not just about the hardware and software
For many organizations there's a big stumbling block in the way of this bright future — their own staff and their ways of working. Figuring out what to invest in may be a lot easier than persuading staff, and whole organisations, to change how they operate.
"What we really need to figure out is the relationship between humans and technology, because right now humans get technology massively wrong," says Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer for Microsoft (a firmly tongue-in-cheek job title, he assures me).
Coplin argues that most of us tend to use new technology to do things the way we've always been doing them for years, when the point of new technology is to enable us to do things fundamentally differently. The concept of productivity is a classic example: "We've got to pick apart what productivity means. Unfortunately most people think process is productivity — the better I can do the processes, the more productive I am. That leads us to focus on the wrong point, because actually productivity is about leading to better outcomes." Three-quarters of workers think a productive day in the office is clearing their inbox, he notes.
Developing a better relationship with technology is necessary because of the huge changes ahead, argues Coplin: "What happens when technology starts to disappear into the background; what happens when every surface has the capability to have contextual information displayed on it based on what's happening around it, and who is looking at it? This is the kind of world we're heading into — a world of predictive data that will throw up all sorts of ethical issues. If we don't get the humans ready for that change we'll never be able to make the most of it."
Nicola Millard, a futurologist at telecoms giant BT, echoes these ideas, arguing that CIOs have to consider not just changes to the technology ahead of them, but also changes to the workers: a longer working life requires workplace technologies that appeal to new recruits as well as staff into their 70s and older. It also means rethinking the workplace: "The open-plan office is a distraction machine," she says — but can you be innovative in a grey cubicle? Workers using tablets might prefer 'perch points' to desks, those using gesture control may need more space. Even the role of the manager itself may change — becoming less about traditional command and control, and more about being a 'party host', finding the right mix of skills to get the job done.
In the longer term, not only will the technology change profoundly, but the workers and managers themselves will also need to upgrade their thinking. Further reading
You may not realize it, but mainframes play a large part in your everyday activities. Did you visit your ATM? Make airline reservations? Swipe your credit card? Then you “touched” a mainframe today. Did you know that 80 percent of the world’s corporate data resides on or originates from mainframes?
Why? For one reason, mainframes are still the most trusted platform, with an EAL5+ security evaluation. Companies rely on mainframe security to provide industrial-strength protection. Mainframes are still the platform of choice for processing mission-critical applications and hosting essential corporate information for banks, health care, insurance, retail, government and other industries largely because of mainframe security.
Furthermore, mainframes have become the true mother of reinvention: They have evolved and reinvented themselves with new technology, supporting cloud, mobile, big data and social innovation. Mainframes have transformed from isolated glass house systems to fully connected servers for Internet web applications, data analytics and private clouds. Security has also evolved to keep pace with innovation. It has been an interesting journey.
Mainframe in the Beginning
At first, System/360 security was very simple: To protect sensitive information, you created data set passwords specified on batch jobs with Job Control Language (JCL). While it was easy to share the password to allow data access, it was far more difficult to deny someone access later, which required changing the password and notifying all the other valid users.
The first step in the security journey was to establish user identification (user IDs) and authentication. Access control lists indicated who could access the data and how. This security information needed to be administered by authorized security managers in secure repositories. In 1976, IBM announced IBM Resource Access Control Facility for mainframes, with capabilities including:
User groups and privileged roles, such as auditors, operators and special administrators.
Resource protection for data sets, files, tapes, programs, applications and general resources.
Auditing of security events, including user log-on, data access and privileged operations.
Mainframe Security and Applications Evolved
As the mainframe evolved to support new applications beyond batch processing, security evolved along with these applications:
IBM TSO (Time Sharing Option) allowed multiple interactive real-time users.
IBM DB2 offered field-level security controls that wouldn’t impede performance.
IBM IMS and CICS protected transaction applications.
IBM Security AppScan identifies application vulnerabilities and generates reports with intelligent fix recommendations to ease remediation.
Communication Security Expanded to Internet and Mobile Access
Mainframes began to communicate outside their enterprises and across public networks, which required new encryption protocols and new security capabilities, including:
User directories that uniquely identified users across enterprises and domains.
Trusted authentication protocols that utilized certificates instead of passwords.
Secure communication protocols with distributed untrusted systems and mobile users.
Early “Cloud” Capabilities
Many people do not realize that the mainframe offered virtual machine capabilities long before today’s cloud options were available. Mainframes have provided a number of virtualization options over time:
Secure hypervisors that could run software virtual machines.
Physical logical partitions (LPARs) that run virtual machines with physical isolation.
Most recently, blade servers that run systems under the covers of the latest mainframes.
Growth of Database to Big Data Analytics
Mainframes provide robust information security, so it makes sense that mainframes have grown over time to host data warehouses, big data and data analytics. Mainframe data security has been enhanced with IBM Security zSecure and IBM InfoSphere Guardium security solutions. Big data by nature is enterprise-wide, so many other data sources connect with the mainframe. Guardium’s ubiquitous support for a wide variety of platforms and data sources ensures that any potential threats from within or outside the platform are detected, blocked and reported in virtually real time. InfoSphere Guardium Data Encryption for DB2 and IMS Databases provides additional protection of data at rest and in motion over communications at the column, row and segment levels. Security encryption key management solutions protect those keys from disclosure.
Security Intelligence and Compliance
As mainframes transformed, they were exposed to new threats. The overall volume of mainframe and enterprise-wide security events that requires analysis is staggering. Mainframes have new capabilities to obtain actionable insight with security intelligence using zSecure and QRadar SIEM to automate threat analysis, create alerts, monitor status and respond.
As the occurrence of big data breaches grew, new security standards and compliance regulations have been adopted to help protect user payment card information, sensitive financial information, medical health care records and other vulnerable data. These regulations require privileged user monitoring, vigilant audit reporting, data encryption and other security controls that help safeguard information. zSecure offers new compliance framework reporting to demonstrate governance and compliance.
Continued Transformation
Over the past 50 years, the mainframe has evolved from a siloed system to supporting databases, applications, networking, virtual machines, Internet, cloud, mobile, big data and business analytics. Mainframe security has transformed to secure these new capabilities and help customers create the ultimate security platform for their mission-critical workloads. Mainframe security has stood the test of time for 50 years and is still going strong.
I didn’t have to cut short my vacation and race back last week to cover the IBM-Apple agreement. Yes, it’s a big deal, but as far as System z shops go it won’t have much impact on their data center operations until late this year or 2015 when new mobile enterprise applications apparently will begin to roll out.
The deal, announced last Tuesday, promises “a new class of made-for-business apps targeting specific industry issues or opportunities in retail, healthcare, banking, travel and transportation, telecommunications, and insurance among others,” according to IBM. The mainframe’s role will continue to be what it has been for decades, the backoffice processing workhorse. IBM is not porting iOS to the z or Power or i or any enterprise platform.
Rather, the z will handle transaction processing, security, and data management as it always has. With this deal, however, analytics appears to be assuming a larger role. IBM’s big data and analytics capabilities is one of the jewels it is bringing to the party to be fused with Apple’s legendary consumer experience. IBM expects this combination—big data analytics and consumer experience—to produce apps that can transform specific aspects of how businesses and employees work using iPhone and iPad devices and ultimately, as IBM puts it, enable companies to achieve new levels of efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction—faster and easier than ever before.
In case you missed the point, this deal, or alliance as IBM seems to prefer, is about software and services. If any hardware gets sold as a result, it will be iPhones and iPads. Of course, IBM’s MobileFirst constellation of products and services stand to gain. Mainframe shops have been reporting a steady uptick in transactions originating from mobile devices for several years. This deal won’t slow that trend and might even accelerate it. The IBM-Apple alliance also should streamline and simplify working with and managing Apple’s mobile devices on an enterprise-wide basis.
According to IBM its MobileFirst Platform for iOS will deliver the services required for an end-to-end enterprise capability, from analytics, workflow and cloud storage to enterprise-scale device management, security and integration. Enhanced mobile management includes a private app catalog, data and transaction security services, and a productivity suite for all IBM MobileFirst for iOS offerings. In addition to on premise software solutions, all these services will be available on Bluemix—IBM’s development platform available through the IBM Cloud Marketplace.
One hope from this deal is that IBM will learn from Apple how to design user-friendly software and apply those lessons to the software it subsequently develops for the z and Power Systems. Would be interesting see what Apple software designers might do to simplify using CICS.
Given the increasing acceptance of BYOD when it comes to mobile, data centers will still have to cope with the proliferation of operating systems and devices in the mobile sphere. Nobody is predicting that Android, Amazon, Google, or Microsoft will be exiting the mobile arena as a result, at least not anytime soon.
Finally, a lot of commentators weighed in on who wins or loses in the mobile market. In terms of IBM’s primary enterprise IT competitors Oracle offers the Oracle Mobile Platform. This includes mobile versions of Siebel CRM, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and a few more. HP offers mobile app development and testing and a set of mobile application services that include planning, architecture, design, build, integration, and testing.
But if you are thinking in terms of enterprise platform winners and losers IBM is the clear winner; the relationship with Apple is an IBM exclusive partnership. No matter how good HP, Oracle, or any of IBM’s other enterprise rivals might be at mobile computing without the tight Apple connection they are at a distinct disadvantage. And that’s before you even consider Bluemix, SoftLayer, MobileFirst, and IBM’s other mobile assets.
The 2014 Master the Mainframe World Championship winner concepted his entry right before the competition started
May 21, 2014 | By Valerie Dennis
As part of its Mainframe50 celebration, IBM named Yong-Siang Shih of National Taiwan University the winner of the first Master the Mainframe World Championship at the April 8 event in New York. The 2009 winner of the Taiwan Master the Mainframe competition bested 42 other competitors from 23 countries to take the title.
Previous participants who had demonstrated superior programming skills on the mainframe were invited to the competition. While participating, the students sharpened their programming skills; cultivated advanced development tools and learned how the mainframe platform supports cloud, big data and analytics, mobile and security initiatives. In March, competitors were given an already-built application to refine and improve upon, and were tasked with constructing an application that real-world business would use.
April 6, the competitors were brought to IBM in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where they presented their results to a panel of judges. Scores were collected, tallied and six finalists were named. On April 7, those six presented their projects to another set of judges. The top three winners were announced the next day during the Mainframe50 live event.
The top winners for the 2014 Master the Mainframe World Championship are:
First Place: Yong-Siang Shih of National Taiwan University, Taiwan Second Place: Rijnard van Tonder of Stellenbosch University, South Africa Third Place: Philipp Egli of University of Brighton, United Kingdom Fourth Place: Mugdha Kadam of University of South Florida, United States Fifth Place: Shahini Sengupta of RCC Institute of Information Technology, India Sixth Place: Aaron Call Barreiro of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
“One of the most exciting parts of this competition was getting to meet these bright students in person, and getting to know them on a personal level,” says Troy Crutcher, Master the Mainframe project manager, IBM Academic Initiative, System z.
“One of the main goals of the IBM Academic Initiative Master the Mainframe contest is helping these students gain enterprise systems skills that they will be able to use well into the future. Employers are continually looking for these skills,” he explains. “This contest is a way to get them excited and on the System z platform in a fun and educational way.” Competition Brings Out Confidence
As a student at National Chiao Tung University, World Championship winner Shih got involved in Master the Mainframe in the hopes of winning an external hard drive, the 2009 prize for winning the second stage of the three-part competition. Despite this win, he said he was surprised to be invited to the World Championship. However, he was excited to have the opportunity to continue with Master the Mainframe and visit the U.S. for the first time.
“The most rewarding part of this experience was that I got to meet so many people and talked a lot” with others who have similar interests, Shih says. “My favorite memory was presenting my work; I enjoyed the demonstration and I got some very nice feedback. I also felt more confident after this competition.”
Shih attributes his win to luck based on timing and circumstances before the competition. In addition to having technical skills—including having recently taken a course about cloud computing—and participating in the National Taiwan University English Debate Society, he came up with the idea of creating a mobile application for debit cards shortly before the competition. In his application, a card is enabled to make an online purchase and disabled immediately afterward so no other charges can be incurred online. That way, if any information gets in the hands of the wrong person, he or she cannot make an unauthorized charge.
“If the third stage were not about an application, I might not have been able to think of another bright idea,” Shih notes. “Everything worked so perfectly together that this itself is incredible.”
Shih, in his first year of graduate school, has professional experience with an internship on IBM’s DataPower quality assurance team, mainly developing a test framework. After college, he said he hopes to work as a software engineer.
Students Benefit From Experiences
Although no concrete plans are in place for another World Championship, Crutcher says there are talks of such an event. He had heard positive feedback and that the students had an amazing time in New York.
“Not only did the participants get to compete with some of the best minds around the world, they got to explore the city,” he says. “A few of them had never even been on a plane before, let alone leave their home country. This was a huge event that they will continue to benefit from in the future.”
The Master the Mainframe competition is open to high school and university students that go to schools involved in the Academic Initiative. To learn more about the competition, visit the Master the Mainframe page here. Read Shih’s first-person account of the competition and his application in his blog here.
Valerie Dennis is site editor of Destinationz.org.
- See more at: http://www.destinationz.org/Academia/Articles/The-Luckiest-Man-in-the-World.aspx#sthash.gCURGMoO.dpuf
By Pat Toole and Frank DeGilio
Fifty years ago, IBM CEO Thomas Watson Jr. unveiled the System/360—the first general purpose computing system specifically designed for business—calling it “the beginning of a new generation, not only of computers, but of their applications in business, science and government.”
It was this vision for computing that made possible the creation of bar codes, ATMs, electronic stock trading, online travel reservations, weather modeling and countless other inventions that have changed the way the world works.
Watson’s statement is as timely and true today as it was then, in the context of the evolution that’s occurring within IT via cloud computing. The System/360 ushered in the era of flexibility, adaptability, and economy for IT. It pioneered the concepts of backward and forward compatibility, the ability to add capacity as you needed it, and protecting the client’s investments in their technology, applications and data.
As we talk about the next inevitable phases of cloud, like platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), we encounter some very specific themes and challenges that cry out for systems with those qualities:
• How do I provide multi-tenancy with the greatest number of people sharing the same machine as possible, securely and efficiently? • How do I dynamically scale an environment immediately without waiting to provision? • How do I provide each user a unique performance experience on the smallest number of systems possible? • How do I keep track of how much capacity each user is using? • How do I support thousands of users with a handful of IT professionals?
If there were an ideal operating system that could provide multi-tenancy, dynamic scaling, a unique user experience, fine-grained usage monitoring, and that could support thousands of users with a small group of admins, PaaS and SaaS solutions would be simple. Oh wait, there is—z/OS.
What was once only accessible to COBOL and Assembler programmers is now available to anyone. Today, a team of young IBM hardware and software developers in Poughkeepsie is creating simple web-based interfaces for z/OS, which will allow any programmer with web development experience to use this powerful platform for PaaS and SaaS.
IBM also continues to refine the technology and the delivery of mainframe computing for cloud applications. The new IBM Enterprise Cloud System can support up to 6,000 virtual machines in a single system, provide a secure multi-tenant environment and dynamically share resources across enterprise workloads, with higher system efficiency and greater scalability that lowers the total cost of Linux cloud deployments by up to 55 percent over comparable x86-based cloud infrastructure.
And the new “IBM MSP Utility Pricing for System z” pricing model, delivered through IBM Global Financing, provides consumption-based pricing designed especially to make mainframe technologies more widely accessible to Managed Service Providers. This consumption-based approach allows MSPs to focus on building their businesses, rather than on the cost of their infrastructure.
These innovations unlock the potential for z/OS and the modern mainframe to be the cloud platform of choice, enabling people to create business solutions built on the most secure, available, reliable cloud infrastructure ever known.
The mainframe is a revolutionary computing system that is transforming business, whole industries, and the world as we know it.
By continually adapting to trends and evolving IT, we’re driving new approaches to cloud, analytics, security and mobile computing to help tackle challenges never before thought possible. We do that by collaborating with our clients to build better technology every day.
But the pioneering innovations of the mainframe all serve one enduring mission: Deliver game-changing technology that makes the extraordinary possible and improves the way the world works.
See the link below to watch a replay of the April 8 NYC Mainframe50 event.
Critical financial services to Africa’s unbanked 80 percent
FNB's "bank in a box" enables millions of individuals across Africa to startup new businesses, save for college and improve lives
Met Office
Vital reports to empower industries and save lives
The Met Office generates thousands of weather forecasts a day to help global industries and governments make crucial decisions
Walmart
Helping 250 million people a week save money and live better
From a Five and Dime in Bentonville, Arkansas to a retail superforce serving customers in 27 countries around the world, Walmart has built an empire on one simple value: the customer always comes first.
First National Bank
Critical financial services to Africa’s unbanked 80 percent
FNB's "bank in a box" enables millions of individuals across Africa to startup new businesses, save for college and improve lives
First National Bank
Critical financial services to Africa’s unbanked 80 percent
FNB's "bank in a box" enables millions of individuals across Africa to startup new businesses, save for college and improve lives
Met Office
Vital reports to empower industries and save lives
The Met Office generates thousands of weather forecasts a day to help global industries and governments make crucial decisions
Walmart
Helping 250 million people a week save money and live better
From a Five and Dime in Bentonville, Arkansas to a retail superforce serving customers in 27 countries around the world, Walmart has built an empire on one simple value: the customer always comes first.
GENERATION z
They will create the future.
Every year, students at over 1,000 universities across 67 countries are learning to solve tomorrow’s grand challenges with the mainframe.
The top 43 students from around the globe met in New York City for the first ever Master the Mainframe World Championship.
They invented the modern world. Organizations and leaders have reinvented business, transformed industries and helped solve some of the world’s greatest challenges with the world’s most innovative and trusted platform. These achievements are woven into the fabric of industry and society.
Sabre reservation system
The world’s first automated passenger reservation system, Sabre, is the basis for today’s web-based travel industry. Launched on two IBM 7090 mainframes, the application written in the 60s is able to process billions of transactions a week today.
