The new IBM z15 ANNOUNCED - What it has to offer to the Business?

Thursday, September 12, 2019 was when IBM announced the arrival of the newest member to its already enriched family of the "Z" Enterprise Mainframe computing platform. And, sticking to the Mantra of Mainframe Modernization and keeping in tune to the demands of the modern businesses, it is no surprise that the new z15 has been designed and architected to be the preferred platform for businesses wanting the cloud of their choice, paralleled with industry-first privacy and security. And, therefore, the USP tagline “the cloud you want with the privacy and security you need” for the new z15 sums up perfectly what modern businesses could gain out of the z15 machine in particular and the Z Enterprise Mainframe computing platform as a whole.

Let us explore some of the key features that the new IBM z15 has to offer to the world.

(1) Ever Heightened Data Privacy and Security

Data Security has remained the number 1 concern for businesses world wide for a while now. In fact, while embracing an enterprise wide Cloud strategy continues to be one of the top goals and priorities for most businesses, data compliance and security always has remained one of the biggest concerns for businesses to moving their mission-critical workloads to the Cloud.

The IBM Mainframe Computing platform, since it's commercial inception, has been known to be the most secure platform, providing industry-leading data security for the data that resides within the platform. "Pervasive Encryption for IBM Z" came along in 2017 with the announcement of z15's most immediate predecessor, the IBM z14 Mainframe server- Pervasive Encryption had upped the ante with regards to the whole Data Privacy and Security ballgame.

And, with the z15, IBM has taken the security game to a whole new dimension with it's industry-first "Encryption Everywhere" feature which it calls the 'IBM Data Privacy Passports'. Why the 'Passport' analogy? Just like a 'Passport' enables you to legally and securely travel from one international border to another, the 'IBM Data Privacy Passports' feature ensures that the data remains encrypted irrespective of wherever it resides. So, in true essence, data privacy follows the data wherever it goes (the ever encompassing Data Privacy part) and data access management can be performed on the data, no matter where it resides; you can revoke access to the data if you ever need to do that and you do not care where the data resides (the Data Security part).

Therefore, with the z15, the all reliable and powerful data privacy and security mechanisms that protect your data on-premise can be safely implemented and extended to the data off the IBM Z platform as well. So, why worry? With z15, "Ensure data privacy with encryption everywhere".

(2) Redaction of sensitive data from Diagnostic Files

As a necessity for troubleshooting problems that they might have from time to time, Mainframe users worldwide need to share diagnostic data that may include sensitive business data with IBM and different ISVs. With IBM z15 and z/OS V2.4 comes the power to redact all sensitive data from the diagnostic files before passing them on. This would ensure that you get the desired support without fearing about sensitive business data exposure and compromising your data privacy requirements, thus, securing yourself from breaching any data compliance rules and regulations that your business needs to adhere to.

(3) Instant System Recovery Boost Feature

Business downtime doesn't come for free - in today's world of fiercely competitive business market, every second and minute of business-critical systems and applications' downtime means that your business is incurring losses and your competitors are gaining as long as the downtime persists. The IBM Z machines are already known for near zero downtimes and the 'time to system recovery' game play only improves with the new IBM z15.

With planned outages for system maintenance and updates as well as unplanned outages requiring system shutdown, the IBM z15's all new "Instant System Recovery Boost" feature ensures that more processing power would be made available to the recovering system resulting in a significant speed up of the system recovery time, thereby cutting down on the system downtime and negative business impact. IBM claims that the new "Instant System Recovery Boost" feature enables an almost 50% improvement in the ability of the businesses to get up and running. In essence, the recovery boost feature enables an almost two times faster completion of the business transaction backlog (transactions on hold with the system down) without incurring any additional software costs to the users.

(4) A "LEANER" Build Design

The IBM z13 and z14 server machines were both built to be 24 inches for a single frame width. The new z15 single frame machine boasts of being the "leanest" ever with a single frame width being 19 inches. From whatever specifications and information I have gathered from the IBM z15 website, the z15 single frame machine requires around 75 percent less floor space when compared to an x86 server. And, not only that, businesses that now employ an IBM z14 machine can also gain a significant portion of their datacenter floor space back on shifting to the new z15 server. A single frame z15 system occupies less than half the datacenter floor space when compared to its immediate predecessor z14 system.

The new IBM z15 machine is available to the customers in a 1, 2, 3 or 4 frame configuration build. As more and more businesses world wide look towards gradual and progressive shifting to cloud data centers, ways to significantly reduce data center floor space would be a win-win situation for everybody involved and that's where the z15's ability to seamlessly coexist with the other platforms in the data center brings in a great business value. IBM, therefore, says that businesses would "gain flexibility in the cloud data center" with the new z15. And, why not? The new IBM z15 server machine can easily fit into the cloud data center rack slots.

The IBM z15 four-frame machine

The IBM z15 three-frame machine

The IBM z15 two-frame machine

The IBM z15 one-frame machine

And, by the way, I haven't seen a machine as beautiful as the IBM z15 in my lifetime. 💓 Have you?

(5) Energy Efficiency

New power distribution options have been introduced into the z15 which IBM says will make these machines more energy efficient.

When compared to that of a 19-inch x86 server, a z15 machine is likely to use 40% less energy.

(6) SCALABILITY gets an even more boost

The IBM Z Mainframe computing systems have always been known to be highly scalable systems since their first commercial inception. With z15, the scalability factor reaches new heights of technical excellence.

As per the data published on the IBM z15 website, a head-turning number of 1 TRILLION SECURE Web Transactions can the z15 execute in a single day. If this doesn't soak yourself into the deepest sense of respect of what a technical marvel the IBM Z Mainframe computing platform is, I am sure that nothing else ever will !!! And, the technical manufacturing genius simply doesn't stop there - upto a maximum of 190 configurable cores (CPs or IFLs), a minimum 512 GB Memory and a Maximum orderable Memory of upto 40 TB; you can imagine the extremely high performance factor that the z15 is capable of delivering for the business.

A maximum allowable configuration of 2.4 million containers on a single system alone - all these staggering, mind-boggling numbers only give you a sense of how highly scalable the z15 is. And, no doubt, IBM calls for the use of z15 to scale for a potentially unlimited business growth factor.

(7) Built-in On-chip Data Compression technique

With more number of businesses looking towards hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure, it becomes more of an imperative that data across systems flow with the speed, agility and security that helps businesses grow, prosper, thrive and survive in today's highly competitive business landscape. The introduction of the state-of-the-art on-chip data compression technology in IBM z15 significantly reduces the data cost and improves data throughput and performance, when compared to the statistics if data compression had to go through some external form of hardware explicitly built for data compression functionality or some type of data compression software.

(8) Cloud Native Development and Deployment Capabilities

There is no denying the fact that the new IBM z15 has been built for the Cloud and IBM has also been marketing the machine on no different terms.

• Development simplified and made easier using tools and technologies (Contarization technology, for example) that cloud-native developers are familiar with (Cloud Native Development capabilities that makes hosting container-based applications for hybrid and private cloud workloads easier than ever)
• Integration capability of z/OS services into hybrid cloud applications for agile deployment across a business's hybrid cloud infrastructure (Agile Cloud Native Deployment capabilities)
• Capability to modernize your existing z/OS Applications and building and deploying new ones
• With the 'z/OS Container Extensions', for the first time ever, "Linux on System Z" Applications can be run on z/OS.
• The two most disruptive technologies of the present technological era, namely, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence, are here for the customers to be made use of on the new z15 server machine. Secure, enterprise blockchain solutions can be seamlessly delivered on the z15 using the IBM Blockchain Platform.

SUMMARY

So, all in all, the new IBM z15 Mainframe Enterprise server machine looks poised to deliver businesses a highly secured, resilient, flexible and agile platform for the enablement of their mission critical workloads on the modern hybrid multi-cloud environment. We might have already witnessed with the announcement of the new IBM z15, a perfect initiative of the modern era Cloud Computing Technology empowerment using the latest and the greatest technological advancements of the IBM Z Mainframe Computing Platform. The future definitely looks to be a very, very promising one for the IBM Mainframes.

IBM Mainframe and the Cloud - A Perfect Match

The author of the technical article, Subhasish Sarkar, who specializes in different IBM Z mainframe technologies, is a senior SQA engineer at BMC Software India Pvt. Ltd.

DISCLAIMER. The views expressed in the articles are solely of the author, and BMC Software in no way endorses the author's view.