GRIDtoday AMD
DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
  ( Table of Contents )  
Breaking News - Platforms:

IBM Announces Mainframe Strategy To Anchor On Demand Business

IBM announced a comprehensive set of investments, initiatives and technology introductions in support of the IBM mainframe computing platform. At customer events in Paris, Tokyo and New York, IBM outlined a strategy aimed at leveraging the mainframe's strengths to help customers become on demand businesses.

IBM said the actions would help address customer requirements for resilient, secure, integrated and intelligent mainframe computing capabilities across their IT infrastructure. As businesses adapt their environments to meet today's challenges, they are realizing the need to weave together their disparate resources within their on demand operating environment into a global fabric, from which information, applications, and technology components can be managed more efficiently in a unified manner. As a result, IBM is leveraging its assets across the company and aligning investments to help clients more quickly implement and manage cross-platform on demand operating environments.

Specific investments and initiatives include:

  • Industry focused solutions. IBM is:
    • Opening a "Banking Operating Environment for On Demand Business," in Montpellier, France. This showcases an example of a working, back-office environment for banking that demonstrates how a flexible, on-demand infrastructure, strengthened by the IBM mainframe, can allow financial services firms to deliver new products and services more quickly and provide a more consistent user experience. If implemented, the environment may permit banks to be able to better respond to regulatory changes, improve security, and routinely handle planned or unplanned outages. The new demonstration joins a growing roster of IBM "future banking showcases" across the globe that together paint a sweeping and compelling vision of how banking will evolve in the next decade -- from explorations of new retail concepts in the branch (Stamford, Conn. and Barcelona) to working prototypes of transformative e-business solutions (Dallas, Sydney).
    • Making available reference architectures for financial services, with planned release of other industry architectures including insurance, and government throughout 2005. These are designed to help businesses more rapidly make the transformation to on demand businesses. The "how-to" architectures are based on the combined expertise across the IBM company and extensive work with customers in each industry.
  • Increasing focus on IBM Business Partners and skills training. IBM is:
    • Working with leading universities around the world with the goal of creating 20,000 new mainframe-trained workers by 2010.
    • Expanding relationships with leading Independent Software Vendors to help broaden the application availability for both z/OS and Linux on the IBM mainframe.
  • Technology and offering developments. IBM is:
    • Unveiling for the first time key technology roadmaps that highlight the mainframe's planned future role in the heterogeneous on demand environment. These are intended to extend essential mainframe capabilities available today including virtualization, business resiliency, security, business integration, and intelligent workload management. In addition, they will leverage the strengths of IBM middleware and software such as DB2, WebSphere, Tivoli and their broad portfolio of tools.
    • Planning zSeries support for IBM Virtualization Engine Systems Services with initial delivery of Enterprise Workload Manager for z/OS planned in 4Q04. This is designed to enable end-to-end monitoring and management of applications across IBM platforms.
    • Introducing GDPS Hyperswap Manager for single site recovery, a new lower cost entry level solution for dynamic management of disk subsystems. Planned to be available in 1Q05.
    • Delivering support of zAAP (zSeries Application Assist Processor) with z/OS 1.6. This enables the integration of WebSphere and Java-based technology workloads with core business applications and data in a cost effective manner.
    • Planning delivery of Communication Controller for Linux on zSeries in 1H05. This is expected to help simplify the integration of SNA networks with a Linux image to replace much of the function provided today by the 3745 and 3746 Communications Controllers.
    • Introducing the z/Transaction Processing Facility Enterprise Edition V1.1.0 -- a next generation operating system designed for high availability transaction processing in many industries, including the travel, banking, finance and public sector markets. The new system supports C/C++, 64-bit zSeries architectures and is capable of processing tens of thousands of transactions per second. It also supports the new zSeries 10 gigabit ethernet with OSA-Express2, now available on zSeries 890 and 990 server lines.
    • Providing Business Integration workshops to develop tailored blueprints for automating business processes and integrating, extending and transforming applications using Services Based Architectures.
    • Leveraging the acquisition of Cyanea and Candle adding further breadth and depth of capabilities for end-to-end infrastructure management. IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON products are now available and supported.
  • Investments in emerging markets, beginning with China. IBM is:
    • Improving technical demonstration capabilities -- planned opening of a new proof-of-concept and benchmarking laboratory focused on industries such as the government and financial services sector, the fastest growing sector in China. In addition to expanding to other industry solutions, the laboratory is expected to provide technical skills training to businesses.
    • Increasing the number of IBM technical sales and support staff in China to help businesses more quickly deploy mainframe-centric solutions.
    • Leveraging zSeries Scholars Program by providing new eServer zSeries mainframes and TotalStorage to numerous universities in China. IBM is planning to work with the universities to develop courses to train new IBM mainframe-skilled workers.
    • Appointing a Strategic Support Initiative (SSI) executive, a new position designed to help government and businesses become more familiar with using mainframes and storage and applying their capabilities to on demand infrastructures.

"Over the past 40 years, we've witnessed industry's evolve from a few transactions per week to millions of transactions per second," said Erich Clementi, general manager of IBM eServer zSeries. "Today, businesses are designing infrastructures intended for the next 20 years, and we are teaming with them to build these global on demand computing fabrics that link tens of thousands of users across open infrastructures, and extending datacenter-level security to the edges of their vast network. This is the time for mainframe computing."

Customers and ISVs are embracing the mainframe-anchored IBM strategy for on demand businesses.

Worldspan, a leader in travel technology services for travel suppliers, travel agencies, e-commerce sites and corporations worldwide, uses IBM eServer zSeries mainframes and Transaction Processing Facility as a pivotal component of its open IT architecture.

"In our business, we need to be able to rapidly respond to thousands of users on a global basis with information that is changing every second in order to deliver the best possible service to our customers," said David Lauderdale, chief technology officer and senior vice president of Worldwide Technical Operations for Worldspan. "With the introduction of z/TPF, IBM adds the increased productivity of a modern Linux development environment to TPF. With this IBM technology, we are able to meet our customer demands and respond more quickly to changing user requirements with a system that provides high levels of scalability, security and resiliency."

Beginning in September 2001, IBM announced sub-capacity pricing to help customers optimize their data center investments and ready the platforms for new workloads. Since that time IBM has extended this offering to include the IBM integrated tools portfolio. ISV's are also moving to usage-based pricing for the zSeries platform.

"By offering Measured Workload Pricing for our management solutions on IBM eServer zSeries, Computer Associates is offering IT organizations greater flexibility in aligning technology spending with evolving business needs," said Mark Combs, senior vice president of corporate pricing at CA. "This will enable our customers to maximize their data center investments and fully leverage the power of their mainframe resources on an on-demand basis."

"Customers today require alignment of IT with the business in order to assure flexibility and agility in dealing with the dynamics of a rapidly changing marketplace. The combination of IBM's On Demand strategy and BMC's Business Service Management offerings enables customers to align business and IT across the zSeries and distributed environments," said Bill Miller, vice president and general manager, mainframe business unity, BMC Software.

The announcement comes as the IBM zSeries mainframe platform experiences tremendous momentum with our clients. Much of the system's popularity owes to its ability to support and bolster ultra-high transaction business environments. With the growth of on demand businesses, IBM is responding to client's demands by leveraging the enterprise-class qualities of service provided by zSeries to build strong heterogeneous solutions, helping clients manage business processes across the enterprise.

( Top of Page )
  ( Table of Contents )