IBM zEnterprise BC12

The IBM zEnterprise BC12 mainframe (zBC12) is intended for support of the latest functionality of a business intelligence, cloud environments and mobile calculations.

The IBM corporation provided the new mainframe on July 23, 2013.

Description

zBC12 is advanced modification of IBM zEnterprise 114 mainframes (z114) which are released in the summer of 2011. Performance improvement of zBC12 is substantially connected with use of the same six-nuclear processors which are installed in the "senior" corporate zEnterprise EC12 servers though their clock rate is lowered from 5.5 to 4.2 GHz and also the capacity of a cache of the third and fourth levels is reduced. At the same time amount of RAM twice exceeds the corresponding indicator of z114 and reaches 496 Gbytes.

Now each core of the microprocessor zBC12 chip has the selected specialized coprocessors for data compression and implementation of cryptographic functions whereas earlier such coprocessors shared two cores.

zBC12 is capable to work jointly with infrastructure of the zBX Model 003 expansion which contains lezviyny servers with Power7 and x86 processors and provides execution of applications in operating environments of IBM AIX, Linux and Windows.

Integration of zBC12 with an accelerator of IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator gives an opportunity to significantly increase performance and cost efficiency of applications of a business intelligence.

Gross performance of zBC12 is twice higher, than his predecessor has z114. According to the published data, the starting price of the new mainframe with a performance of 50 MIPS from 8 Gbytes of memory, four cards of Fibre Connection channels (FICON) and the same number of cards of the network adapters Open Systems Adapter (OSA) is 75 thousand dollars in the American market.

Cloud economy

The zBC12 mainframe is capable to consolidate in cloud environments to 40 virtual servers on each core or up to 520 virtual servers on a single system at the price only 1 dollar a day for one virtual server. Thus, one zBC12 mainframe is capable to cut down the customer's expenses on 55% in comparison with distributed by x86 Wednesdays, claim in corporation.

The version for Linux

The corporation also submitted the version of the zBC12 mainframe working only for Linux - Enterprise Linux Server (ELS).

The product is designed to help customers to expand quickly business, especially in the developing regions. The ELS system includes a hardware platform of z/VM Hypervisor and provides three years of maintenance. A system is capable to support more than 3 thousand existing Linux-applications. Besides, the customer can expand it using two new solutions — ELS for Analytics and Cloud-Ready for Linux on System z that will allow it to pass to use of analytical applications and cloud solutions.

IBM announced new hardware opportunities which allow to reduce use of base processors and RAM thanks to a compression of data on the server. For example, there was a new type of connection between servers which allows to reduce cross-network delays by 80%.