With the release of the System z10, IBM is looking to expand the customer base for its mainframe systems.
NEW YORK-The
latest installment of IBM's "Big
Iron" product has landed with a splash and the company is trying to turn
that into a wave of new mainframe customers.
At events in the United States
and elsewhere Feb. 26,
IBM unveiled
its System z10, the latest installment in its mainframe line. This
$1 million machine now boasts quad-core microprocessor technology and can
support up to 64 processors, which will give the new system a 100 percent performance
increase over older models, according to the company.
Even with all these improvements and IBM's
dominance of this particular part of the market in the United
States and elsewhere, the company is still
looking to expand the reach of its mainframe systems beyond the
traditional customer base, which have mainly used the machine as a back-end
processor for financial services and transaction processing.
In some ways, Tuesday's unveiling was the next logical step in IBM's
continued development of its mainframe business. In 2006, the company set aside
some $100 million to make the mammoth systems easier to use, and in 2007, IBM
announced it would
consolidate
3,900 servers onto 33 mainframes to save the company money and showcase the
systems' abilities.
The new mainframe comes at a time when it appears IBM's
growth has slowed.
According
to research in the most recent survey by Gartner, IBM's
mainframe business slowed in 2007, but other analysts said they believe that
because of the new System z10 the core group of customers will begin refreshing
their hardware by the third or fourth quarter of 2008.
At IBM's presentation here, Steven Mills,
senior vice president of the company's Software Group, told the audience that
the market for mainframes remains robust in the United
States as well as overseas and in developing
economies such as India.
While the new hardware capabilities that IBM
built into the System z10 will appeal to the mainframe's traditional base of
users, Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, said the company is
trying to appeal to new users by touting the mainframe both as a consolidation
platform and as a server with the capacity to support Web 2.0 applications such
as Java and DB2.
IBM has also broadened its mainframe
appeal by allowing users to run Linux and OpenSolaris on the platform, King
said.
"The consolidation platform story is a lot stronger than what IBM
was talking about in regard to the new system being equivalent to 1,500 x86
servers," King said, referring to some statistics that IBM
released about the z10 mainframe.
"When you talk about consolidating all those x86 and Unix servers down
into one box, it's pretty amazing," King added. "There are also some
of the developer tools that they have built in, such as the information-on-demand
feature and Rational developer tools, which are meant to unify mainframe
application developers and Java developers."
Brad Day, an analyst with Forrester Research, said he believes that IBM
is looking to bring the consolidation possibilities of the mainframe together
with the emphasis on Web 2.0 applications through virtualization and the
system's z/VM software.
Day said many customers will find it easier to create one virtual image on a
mainframe in order to keep up with the pace of adding Web 2.0 applications
rather than to buy, partition and create virtual machines on a standard x86
server. This could help IBM expand the business
beyond its traditional base.
"That's where the growth is going to come from and it's going to come
at the expense of distributed systems," Day said. "So the idea is to
consolidate where you have multiple, discrete distributed platforms, whether that
is x86 or Unix."
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