IBM ups the ante on Enterprise systems

By Steve Malone

Posted on 14 May 2003 at 11:28

IBM has launched a new top of the range mainframe class machine that, it claims is almost three times as powerful as the previous z900 series.

The capacities of the machine are fair mind boggling. The company claims the z990 benchmarks at 9,000 MIPS (million instructions per second) on 32 processors It can scale up to process 450 million e-business transactions/day while clustered z990s can handle up to 13 billion transactions/day. The z990 can also automatically add or subtract additional servers to cope with peak capacities.

The box can support thousands of virtual Linux servers in a single unit the size of a refrigerator and can support storage of up to 7 Terabytes.

The key to the improvements, IBM says, is the multichip module. The 3.7in x 3.7in x .75in module, contains 16 chips mounted on 101 layers of ceramic glass connected to over 5,000 I/O pins by 500 metres of wire. The module is based copper and Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology and contains over 3.2 billion transistors. The new MCM is 50 per cent smaller than the earlier z900 generation.

IBM says it has spent $1bn on developing the new machine and has thrown 1,200 developers at the project. For those with a few hundred thousand dollars to spare, IBM is promising delivery of the first machines in June.