IBM is today expected to announce its most powerful mainframe ever
with the z/9, a machine which can be configured with up to 54
processing engines.
Each processing engine can run at 600mips, making the machine 33%
more powerful than the current z/990 high-end machine.
It also offers a resilience mechanism dubbed "concurrent book
removal", that allows users to replace a module, or book,
containing several processors, without the need to power-down or
reboot.
Normally, if processors fail, the fault tolerance mechanism
automatically passes the computation work to redundant processors
in the same module. With the z/9, when several processors fail, an
administrator can now choose to schedule replacement of the entire
module, without affecting the computational workload, experts have
said.
Ray Titcombe, chairman of the IBM Computer Users Association, said,
"A number of large mainframe users have held back purchases waiting
for this box."
But, as businesses prepare to evaluate IBM's latest high-end
offering, Computer Weekly has learned of concerns about how
mainframe software will be licensed. According to Isham Research
analyst Phil Payne, the software workload calculation for the new
box has been biased towards batch processing work. This could make
it more expensive for running real-time transaction processing
applications such as IBM WebSphere or Linux applications.
"Users with heavy use of online loads could be disappointed," he
said.
The z/9 is due to be generally available on 16 September, when IBM
is due to confirm its software licensing scheme.