IBM's z13 Mainframe is the Culmination of $1 Billion and 5 Years of Development

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

The mainframe is dead, long live the mainframe

For IBM, there is no debating whether or not the mainframe is dead. If IBM felt it was, the company wouldn't have gambled $1 billion, five years of development, over 500 new patents, and collaborative efforts with more than 60 clients in the z13, IBM's newest mainframe and, according to Big Blue, one of the most sophisticated computer systems ever built -- high self praise.
IBM says the z13 is the first system that's able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day, which would be the equivalent to 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year. The z13's transactions are persistent, protected, and auditable from end-to-end, and with continued development, IBM estimates it will grow to 40 trillion mobile transactions per day by 2025.
Other notable "unprecedented new capabilities" include practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale, and embedded analytics providing real-time insights on all transactions, which IBM pitches as a capability that can help guarantee running real-time fraud detection on 100 percent of business transactions. In addition, IBM says it delivers on-the-fly analytic insights that are 17 times faster than competitive systems, and at a fraction of the cost.
"Every time a consumer makes a purchase or hits refresh on a smart phone, it can create a cascade of events on the back end of the computing environment. The z13 is designed to handle billions of transactions for the mobile economy. Only the IBM mainframe can put the power of the world's most secure datacenters in the palm of your hand," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems. "Consumers expect fast, easy and secure mobile transactions. The implication for business is the creation of a secure, high performance infrastructure with sophisticated analytics."
The z13 includes new support for Hadoop. It's also capable of running up to 8,000 virtual servers, or more than 50 virtual servers per core.
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