IBM’s new mainframe, the z9-109, provides “the foundation for helping to integrate and manage your mixed IT environment with a simplified, holistic approach,” according to the company. Rather than focusing explicitly on the typical core values of RAS—reliability, security, availability—IBM’s marketing of this new system addresses “core competencies like virtualization, business continuity, intelligent workload management, autonomic functionality and the ability to process secure transactions-while capable of running at up to 100 percent utilization.”

The hard details show that IBM has doubled the processing power of its mainframes and says that the increased power more fully enables serious security measures designed to protect private information, a major issue among mainframe users today. Data encryption can be applied at every data-transfer step without a significant performance loss, thus creating a new world of higher data security, IBM said.

The z9-109 is the ninth generation of IBM's modern z-Series mainframes, with prices starting at around $1 million.  A fully-configured z9-109 has 54 chips. It is expected to be a big winner. "The new platform will allow us to return to the level of growth we saw in the past few years, maybe not exactly the same percentage," Bill Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM Systems and Technology Group, said in an interview.

The IBM Z9-109