IBM has unveiled what it hopes will turn around the fortunes of its mainframe business, with Australian organisations to have access to the zEnterprise System from 10 September.
Although no Australian customers have yet agreed to purchase Big Blue’s new mainframe – which it is happy to point out involved $1.5 billion and three years of research and development - the vendor is confident it will be able to build on the 50 or so customers it already has down under.
“We haven’t had anyone at this point sign on the dotted line but we have had a number of those customers who have gone through specific briefings around this and are certainly keenly looking at this,” IBM System z executive, Mark Binks, told Computerworld Australia. “We are actively working with them now on moving to upgrades.”
Australia’s mainframe market has been predicted to follow the steep global downward trend by analyst firm IDC.
For the second quarter of this calendar year, IBM reported a revenue drop for its mainframe business of 24 per cent year on year; it does not report income or provide a breakdown of the business into geographic locations.
The decline follows more than a year of similar falls with the business posting a 27 per cent drop year on year in the fourth quarter of 2009. In the three quarters prior to that it suffered drops of 26 per cent in the third quarter, 39 per cent in the second quarter and 19 per cent in the first quarter.
IDC analyst, Matt Oostveen, said the potential for a double dip recession in the global economy could hurt IBM’s local mainframe business.
“From a macro perspective, large enterprise customers (traditionally the target market for mainframe systems) still have reduced IT budgets which is a hangover from the global recession and the talk about the possibility of a double dip will certainly dampen confidence,” he said.
“The Australian results are not yet in for Q2, but there is certainly no indication that Australia will outperform the global trend of a declining mainframe market. Australia has had one of the most robust mainframe (CISC) markets in the world however the slow-down is expected to reach our shores.”
Another analyst firm, Gartner has also noted that the pick up in the x86 market in recent years has eaten into the mainframe business. However, IBM is hoping to combat this trend with the new System z, which offers the option of integrating blade chassis and virtualising under a single view.
“It is a nirvana we have all been hoping to get to and we are certainly there now with this announcement,” Binks said. “We got to this point of integration working with 30 of our large customers around the world on the challenges they saw in running their IT shops. The integration of the different environments is what they saw as important. I wouldn’t say it is one environment over another but it is the fact we have to be able to integrate successfully so that an application or a transaction can complete and have a view of that.”
When combining the BladeCenter Extension with the new Unified Resource Manager, IBM claims organisations will be able to manage workloads across the mainframe and select Power7 and System x servers with up to 100,000 virtualised servers able to be managed on a single, fully-configured cluster of systems.
Additionally it says support is available for blades running AIX and that new general purpose blades running Linux will be released later this year.
“With the announcement you’ll be able to attach blades in a 19-inch rack to the mainframe,” Binks said. “We can attach four racks with up to eight blade centres, this means we can scale up to handling 50 billion transactions per second. Which, if you do the numbers from there, equates to eight transactions per second for every human on the face of the planet.”
(In Pictures: IBM's new System z mainframe)
The vendor is also offering a water cooling option for the core server – the zEnterprise 196 that has 96 5.2Ghz processors.