IBM announces integrated mainframe packages
IBM on Friday announced a line-up of integrated mainframe, software and services packages designed for specific tasks such as datawarehousing, service-oriented architecture and transactions.
The announcement highlights the latest hardware trend — vendors are increasingly pushing function-specific hardware optimised for a certain task. Teradata, Oracle's Exadata machine, IBM, HP and others have variations of the same theme.
IBM's System z is its bread-and-butter mainframe lineup. In a statement, IBM said it is offering new programs to entice Sun and HP customers to migrate to Linux on System z. The company has been repositioning the mainframe to the new highly transactional workloads needed.
The latest line-up of task-specific mainframe packages are modelled after IBM's System z for SAP effort: a mainframe optimised to run SAP with middleware and services bundled.
The tailored mainframe packages, dubbed System z Solution Edition. include the following:
- Data Warehousing covers business intelligence deployments
- Application Development for distributed development
- Disaster Recovery with configurations for continuous availability
- Enterprise Security, for fraud analysis and centralised identity management
- Electronic payments for customers that run ACI Worldwide payment software
- SOA, a mainframe that includes IBM's WebSphere Application Server