IBM has revealed further details of the z9, the
successor to its z990 high-end mainframe, offering up to twice the
performance and capacity of its predecessor.
According to Doug Nielson, senior eServer consultant at IBM, the
z9 offers users more capacity and ability to consolidate IT
systems.
But no pricing information is available about software licences
until September, when the machine is expected to launch, so users
will be unable to ascertain how much the box will actually cost to
run.
Isham Research analyst Phil Payne, who has been investigating
the pricing, has found some problems relating to IBM's Large Scale
Performance Reference (LSPR) that could affect the way the box is
deployed.
"It is biased 70% towards batch [workloads] and 30% towards
online," he said. LSPR is a series of benchmarks for different
mainframe workloads: batch long jobs, batch short jobs, Java batch
job, Websphere database, transaction processing and low I/O.
IBM generally provides a weight for each workload which users
can then take to see how much running the software will cost in
their own IT environments.
Running more online than batch workloads could prove costlier,
Payne warned, because the licensing is indicated by how the LSPR is
weighted.
Another factor affecting users is how much IBM plans to discount
software on the z9. Payne said it can take days for users to
determine how their own workloads reflect LSPR.
Without the licensing costs, it makes it difficult to plan
budgets, Payne said. He urged anyone assessing the z9 to assume the
upper licensing limit will be the same as the z990.
The 64-processor z9 offers up to 80% greater I/O bandwidth than
the z990 and allows administrators to repair memory and remove
processor modules on running systems without the need to power down
the hardware.