IBM’s $1 billion mobile bet takes shape of a 'monster' mainframe

IBM has announced one of the most sophisticated computer systems ever built, called z13. The z13 delivers scale and economics, together with real-time encryption and analytics to help meet the expectations of consumers for speed and safety for trillions of transactions in the mobile economy.

“The z13 system culminates a $1 billion investment, five years of development, exploits the innovation of more than 500 new patents and represents a collaboration with more than 60 clients,” IBM said.

The z13 is the first mainframe system with embedded analytics providing real-time transaction insights 17x faster than compared competitive systems. IBM’s z13 is the first system able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day and make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale.

“Every time a consumer makes a purchase or hits refresh on a smartphone, it can create a cascade of events on the back end of the computing environment. The z13 is designed to handle billions of transactions for the mobile economy. Only the IBM mainframe can put the power of the world’s most secure datacentres in the palm of your hand,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems. “Consumers expect fast, easy and secure mobile transactions. The implication for business is the creation of a secure, high performance infrastructure with sophisticated analytics.”

The z13 features the world’s fastest microprocessor, 2X faster than the most common server processors, 300 percent more memory, 100 percent more bandwidth and vector processing analytics to speed mobile transactions. “As a result, the z13 transaction engine is capable of analysing transactions in “real time” and will be able to help prevent fraud as it is occurring, allowing financial institutions to halt the transaction before the consumer is impacted.”

With the z13, businesses will be able to use IBM’s predictive analytics modeling technology, SPSS, and personalise the transaction as it occurs.

The z13 includes new support for Hadoop, enabling unstructured data to be analysed in the system. Other analytics advances include faster acceleration of queries by adding DB2 BLU for Linux providing an in-memory database, enhancements to the IBM DB2 analytics accelerator, and improved performance for mathematically intense analytics workloads.

The z13 is the ideal private or hybrid cloud architecture. In a scale-out model, it is capable of running up to 8,000 virtual servers – more than 50 virtual servers per core, helping to lower software, energy and facilities costs.

The system lowers the cost of running cloud. For compared environments, it is estimated that a z Systems cloud on a z13 will have a 32 percent lower total cost of ownership over three years than an x86 cloud and a 60 percent lower total cost of ownership over three years than a public cloud. Additionally, the z13 is based on open standards, fully supporting Linux and OpenStack.

As part of the announcement, IBM will also unveil a preview of new z/OS software that delivers advanced analytic and data serving capabilities. When available, this new operating system will expand the ability of z13 to process in-memory analytics and provide analysis on mobile transactions, helping clients to further extend mainframe enterprise applications to the mobile user.

Now, this system comes as a boon for e-commerce companies. Indian e-commerce giant such as Flipkart can infact avoid repeating the ‘Big Billion Day’ debacle. Despite the fact that the company deployed nearly 5000 servers, the sale ran into lot of glitches and ultimately turned into a disaster.  If IBM’s z13 can deliver what it promises, e-tailers can breathe a sigh of relief.