Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
IBM is launching what it calls a "skinny mainframe" for cloud computing. The system is built around IBM z14 mainframe technology, and it features a 19-inch industry standard, single-frame case design, allowing for easy placement into public cloud data centers and for private cloud deployments.
[...] With the mainframe in high demand and more relevant than ever, IBM worked closely on the design with more than 80 clients, including managed service providers, online banks, and insurance firms, to reinvent the mainframe for a whole new class of users.
The new z14 and LinuxOne offerings also bring significant increases in capacity, performance, memory, and cache across nearly all aspects of the system. A complete system redesign delivers this capacity growth in 40 percent less space, standardized to be deployed in any data center. The z14 ZR1, announced today, can be the foundation for an IBM Cloud Private solution, creating a "data center in a box" by co-locating storage, networking, and other elements in the same physical frame as the mainframe server.
The z14 ZR1 delivers 10 percent more capacity than its predecessor, the z13s, and, at 8TB, twice the memory. The system can handle more than 850 million fully encrypted transactions per day.
Source: https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/09/ibm-launches-skinny-mainframe-for-the-cloud/
Also at The Register
Technical Introduction(IBM Redbook)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 12 2018, @09:41PM
They've been pushing this "lease the capacity you use" model for a long time. It makes some sense if you let them put the hardware in your rack and you're only paying for 10% of its capability, but have that option to scale up at any time just by paying more when you need it.
We looked at their 2006 offering (not much different from today's except 12 years less capable) - and it just didn't make sense for us because we would be saturating the device's capacity for 5 minutes, then letting it stand idle for 55 minutes, then saturating it again - so we had to pay full fare for the compute power to be on-demand like that, and they were coming in at about 2x the price of similar power in a rack of Mac Pros at the time (when you untangle lease vs buy options etc.)
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