IBM's New System z Mainframe Offerings Help Customers Deploy New Workloads
System z "Solution Edition" and Linux Program help enterprises benefit from performance, resiliency of the IBM mainframe
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IBM today announced the System z Solution Edition Series, a collection of seven integrated hardware, software, and services packages that help customers deploy new enterprise workloads such as data warehousing, risk mitigation, and disaster recovery.
The programs reflect an IBM strategy that opens up System z to new workloads so customers can run a much wider range of their business activities with the reliability, transaction-processing capabilities, and management capabilities and efficiencies of the IBM mainframe.
The Solution Edition offerings are designed to make the cost of deploying new workloads on System z price-competitive with alternative distributed systems which may not be as reliable, scalable, or secure.
The Solution Edition offerings are complete stack solutions that include IBM System z hardware, IBM middleware products, and maintenance programs for new business functions, such as:
- Data warehousing: With the System z Solution Edition for Data Warehousing, customers can deploy new business intelligence applications on System z while avoiding lengthy delays common to acquiring and integrating distributed servers.
- Application development: The System z Solutions Edition for Application Development reduces the cost of mainframe deployment of new workloads while facilitating a development environment that is consistent with distributed platforms.
- Disaster recovery: The System z Solutions Edition for GDPS (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex) offers attractive prices on a range of popular continuous-availability and disaster-recovery configurations.
- Security: With the System z Solution Edition for Enterprise Security, customers can minimize online security threats for business compliance, centralized enterprise identity and access management, encryption and key management, and fraud analysis.
- Risk mitigation: The System z Solution Edition for ACI benefits customers that run applications from ACI Worldwide, an international provider of software for electronic payment systems. ACI's retail and fraud payments applications are optimized for System z.
- The System z Solution Edition for WebSphere combines System z technology with IBM's WebSphere Application Server for a foundation to build, reuse, run, integrate, and manage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications and services.
The new Solution Edition series also enhance the existing SAP offering, which is designed to provide near-continuous availability and secure data protection with DB2 for z/OS databases on System z. The solution can now be combined with SAP application deployments for running Linux on the System z platform.
IBM also announced new pricing for its Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), also known as a "specialty engine," to help companies consolidate workloads from siloed, inefficiently used servers onto Linux on the System z platform.
For more information, visit www.ibm.com/mainframe.