IBM has given a major boost to its 40-year-old mainframe
line with the announcement of a series of new reference
architectures to meet specific business needs and a commitment to
create 20,000 mainframe engineers by 2010.
The strategy involves making on-demand reference architectures
available for financial services, with a planned release of other
industry architectures, including insurance and government, in
2005.
Erich Clementi, general manager of the IBM eServer zSeries, said,
"Businesses are designing infrastructures intended for the next 20
years and we are teaming up with them to build global 0n-demand
computing fabrics."
IBM said it would be working with universities around the world to
create 20,000 new mainframe-trained workers by 2010.
Technical developments on the mainframe include a new operating
system called z/Transaction Processing Facility Enterprise Edition
v1.1.0, which is designed for high-availability transaction
processing.
IBM will also deliver zSeries support for IBM's Virtualisation
Engine Systems Services with initial delivery of Enterprise
Workload Manager for the z/OS in the fourth quarter of this year.
IBM said it would support Zaap (zSeries Application Assist
Processor) with z/OS 1.6, which will provide low-cost integration
between Websphere and Java-based workloads with core business
applications.
Forrester Research said Zaap was relevant to IBM users running
Java. Forrester analyst Colin Rankine said early adopters of IBM's
new mainframe programming models had experienced disappointing
performance, where Java used more computer resources than
Cobol.
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