Leading Organizations Choose IBM's Midrange Mainframe for On Demand Reliability7 May 2005
IBM today announced that customers around the world are embracing IBM's powerful mainframe for medium-sized enterprises, available since May 2004. IBM has shipped the equivalent amount of capacity of the IBM eServer z890 system in one third the amount of time as its predecessor, the IBM eServer z800 midrange system.
"The z890 program has been one of the most successful 390 or zSeries programs we've ever introduced," said Terri Virnig, vice president, IBM eServer zSeries. "The z890 introduced greater choice and flexibility, allowing for horizontal or vertical growth of capacity. Customers can grow on demand with smaller increments of computing power. The z890 is an ideal solution for the mid-size enterprise customer who requires extremely high reliability and scalability."
The z890 provides more than twice the capacity ( when fully configured ) and almost three times as many capacity choices than the z890's predecessor offered, which can help companies create a more efficient on demand IT infrastructure to handle business fluctuations. One hallmark of the midrange success has been that the business partner channel accounts for about 60 percent of z890 sales versus about 20 percent for the top-of-the-line z990.
Dan Nassif, vice president of zSeries Solutions Practice at MSI Systems Integrators, an IBM Business Partner, said, "We attribute the resurgence of the mainframe and the success of the z890 in part to the new workloads running on the mainframe. With Linux and now the introduction of IBM zSeries Application Assist Processor ( zAAP ) -- the zSeries a specialized Java-processor for z/OS -- has helped increase price performance and delivered benefits to their mainframe customers' bottom-line."
Leading companies from around the globe have embraced the z890 to run mission-critical business applications:
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canada's national police service, uses z/OS on z890 to run administrative and police systems that require 24/7 reliability and scalability in order to share information with other Canadian police services, the FBI, Interpol and other law enforcement agencies. With Tivoli Storage Manager, the z890 serves as the on demand hub for the RCMP's back-up and disaster recovery services for other servers. Through the use of z/OS.e and the implementation of z890 processors the RCMP will realize a substantial decrease in its annual software and processor maintenance costs.
University of Miami, one of the largest private research universities in the southeast U.S., is running its z890 with an Integrated Facility for Linux engine ( IFL ) processor for high availability applications such as university administrative tasks, and healthcare and other academic research. The university is running multiple instances of Linux Novell/SuSE SLES8 under the z/VM operating system with the intention of consolidating its applications from Dell servers. The university estimates to save $600,000 over the next five years with the z890. PSR, a Canton, Massachusetts-based IBM business partner worked with the University on this project.
Montreal Informática, a Brazilian service provider, uses a z890 for running all sorts of IT solutions including managing the web portal for selling "smart tickets," used in Brazil public transportation for individual citizens and businesses alike. The z890 supports the entire Smart Tickets sales cycle -- selling credits via the Internet and also evaluating the card's usage in buses in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The solution relies on Java applications running on zAAP and WebSphere, and the business partner was INGRAM.
eircom, the leading provider of telecommunications services in Ireland, has tapped the z890 mainframe to run its telephone billing, service orders functions, and other key business applications. The z890 is the main revenue-related IT system in use in the company, providing far greater scalability to eircom and the ability to run the full range of newer technologies such as Linux, Java and J2EE on their mainframe. zSeries business partner Morse assisted with the migration.
The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, a public institution providing information on civil society and public interest, uses their z890 with Linux to calculate and disseminate critical government statistics. The new z890 is attached to an IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server 750.
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, a top Portuguese university, has tapped the z890 running Linux to power its application for academic management, providing students, teachers and administrative staff with real-time access to all academic information. The University is migrating from an Intel platform to the zSeries running Novell/SuSE SLES8, tapping a storage area network including a global storage system with one enterprise storage server and a backup tape unit.
Cepromat, an IT provider for the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, uses its z890 to manage the import and export of the State's agricultural products. The z890 centralized the State's critical applications including legacy and new Java applications running DB2 on Linux for zSeries, to help decrease software costs, and increase reliability and security. The solution was sold though IBM business partner Ação Informatica.
Demonstrating IBM's continuing commitment to innovation and the balanced system design for the on demand zSeries platform, IBM zSeries has enhanced these world-class features since the introduction of the z890:
Server security and balanced workload -- IBM has introduced a new cryptographic feature, Crypto Express 2, for more secure SSL transactions in transaction-heavy industries, such as financial services.
High-speed networking -- IBM introduced a new 10-Gigabit Ethernet and new Gigabit Ethernet features, OSA-Express2, with enhanced functions.
Storage Area Network ( SAN ) -- IBM refreshed its SAN with FICON® Express2 to increase FICON channel maximums to better meet the ever increasing demands of SANs and increased performance.
Back-up and recovery -- New GDPS® enhancements help provide better business resiliency and data protection through PPRC Failover/Failback for GDPS/PPRC HyperSwap, and two FlashCopy enhancements.
Performance -- IBM has expanded the Local Area Network ( LAN ) large-send support. This is designed to improve performance by off-loading outbound TCP segmentation processing from the host to OSA-Express2. This can help reduce host processor utilization, returning CPU cycles for application use while increasing network efficiencies.
About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to take full advantage of the new era of on demand business. For more information about IBM visit www.ibm.com.
IBM, eServer, zSeries and the IBM e-business logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. For a list of additional IBM trademarks, please see www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
All other company/product names and service marks may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.
Source: i-Newswire
All trademarks and copyrighted information contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
Related Articles
|
