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IBM Announces the System z10 for the Next Generation Data Center
As Tuesday, February 26, 2008, begins in each timezone, IBM announces the new System z10 for all the world's next generation data centers. Here, for example, is the Japanese language press release:
http://www.ibm.com/jp/press/2008/02/2601.html
We mainframe bloggers will try to keep everyone informed as we hear more from IBM, so check back for updates. I suspect we'll also have some interesting thoughts and perspectives to offer.
I see that Wikipedia already has a short article. That's fast!
UPDATE #1: Released at 12:01 a.m. New York time, here's the English version of the press release along with a short video and some pictures:
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=825324
UPDATE #2: And here's a picture of the new greenest of green machines:
UPDATE #3: IBM has posted a large number of official announcement letters. Here are the links to the PDFs. Let's read together, shall we?
- 108-154: IBM System z10 Enterprise Class -- The forward thinking mainframe for the 21st century
- 108-155: IBM System Storage DS8000 series (Machine types 2421, 2422, 2423, and 2424) delivers Extended Distance FICON for IBM System z environments
- 108-156: IBM System Storage DS8000 series (Machine type 2107) delivers Extended Distance FICON for IBM System z environments
- 208-038: IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager for Linux on System z, V3.1 is designed to enable optimization of energy consumption for heterogeneous IBM systems
- 208-039: IBM ISPF Productivity Tool V5.10 enhancements deliver increased efficiency for ISPF users
- 208-041: IBM DB2 for z/OS Value Unit Edition offers one-time-charge price metric for net new workloads on IBM System z
- 208-042: Preview: z/OS V1.10 -- Raising the bar and redefining scalability, performance, availability, and economics
- 308-001: IBM GDPS V3.5: Enterprise-wide infrastructure availability
UPDATE #4: Yowza! The System z10 EC announcement is 391 pages!
UPDATE #5: OK, not so much reading. Most of those 391 pages are model conversion tables. So I could skim the announcement quickly for the golden nuggets.
One of the most surprising facts is that the System z10 is available immediately. (Maybe you can send a truck to Poughkeepsie to pick one up today?) The new HiperDispatch feature looks very interesting. There's a bit of a caution in the announcement suggesting that workloads could vary more than usual in how they perform when moving up to the System z10. That makes sense, because there's an awful lot of new technology packed into this model that's way beyond the typical model upgrade. Going from a single core 1.7 GHz processor to a quad-core 4.4 GHz processor design is a big leap.
4.4 GHz per core! (I've got to start getting used to saying "cores" now.) And up to 1.5 TB of memory per machine. Many more capacity model choices to make the costs smoother. Uniprocessor performance increased up to 70% for z/OS mixed workloads -- quite a jump. I also like how IBM is fencing off the HSA. It's 16 GB, but you never see it, and you don't have to pay for it. The Capacity for Planned Events (CPE) looks like a great idea. You can get up to 3 days of capacity for activities like relocating data centers. There's a nice statement of direction concerning z/VM and LPARs. You'll be able to manage all processor types and all operating systems within a single z/VM LPAR. (At present you have to fence resources.) New and improved OSA networking. InfiniBand coupling for Parallel Sysplex, raising the local distance limit up to 150 meters. (Sort of a mini-GDPS distance! Definitely nice for campuses.) There's something about some new time of day capabilities in the base configuration which looks great. The processors now support 1 MB page sizes, and there's both Assembler and C/C++ support for them.
This is a major leap. Still reading.
| by Timothy Sipples | February 25, 2008 in Systems Technology Permalink |
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