New IBM Cloud-ready Mainframe Based on Single-frame Design

IBM announced its newest cloud-ready mainframes, the z14 Model ZR1 and LinuxONE Rockhopper II, the latest additions to its family of servers announced in 2017.

The new systems feature a 19-inch industry standard, single-frame design allowing for easy placement into cloud data centers and for private cloud environments. IBM will also deploy the new systems in their public cloud data centers as the company focuses on enhancing security and performance for increasingly intensive data loads.

In the era of digital business, the mainframe remains for many the most stable, secure and mature environment to support IT initiatives including the proliferation of blockchains. For instance, 87% of all credit card transactions and nearly $8 trillion in payments a year are processed on mainframes. The platform manages 29 billion ATM transactions each year. They are also responsible for processing four billion passenger flights each year.

It’s also critical in a world of increasing cybersecurity concerns. According to Gemalto’s Breach Level Index, of the nearly 10 billion records breached since 2013, only 4 percent of the stolen data was encrypted and therefore was rendered useless to hackers. Capable of processing over 850 million fully encrypted transactions a day on a single system, the new mainframes do not require special space, cooling or energy, but still provide pervasive encryption and Secure Service Container technology for secure data serving at massive scale.

The new IBM systems are designed to bring industry-leading security for Linux environments with the broad use of IBM Secure Service Container technology. Steps can now be taken to protect data against internal threats at the system level from users with elevated credentials or hackers who obtain a user’s credentials, as well as external threats with no application changes.

Software developers benefit by not having to create proprietary dependencies in their code to take advantage of these advanced security capabilities. An application only needs to be put into a Docker container to be ready for Secure Service Container Deployment, and the application can be managed using Docker and Kubernetes tools that are used to make Secure Service Container environments easy to consume.

The new IBM Z 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 and is standardized to be deployed in any data center.