IBM has announced its new cloud-ready mainframes, the IBM z14 Model ZR1 and IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper II, as 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 centres and for private cloud environments.

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.

In addition, the platform manages 29-billion ATM transactions each year, equivalent to nearly $5-billion per day. They are also responsible for processing 4-billion passenger flights each year.

The mainframe is 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% 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 IBM pervasive encryption and Secure Service Container technology for secure data serving at massive scale.

The new IBM systems are designed to offer 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 IBM LinuxONE also offer increases in capacity, performance, memory and cache across almost all aspects of the system.

A complete system redesign delivers this capacity growth in 40% less space and is standardised to be deployed in any data centre.

The z14 ZR1 can be the foundation for an IBM Cloud Private solution, creating a “data centre in a box” by co-locating storage, networking and other elements in the same physical frame as the mainframe server.

The new systems deliver:

* 10% more capacity than predecessor z13s, and twice (8Tb) the memory.

* More than 850-million fully encrypted transactions per day on a single system.

* 19-inch standard form factor, 50% more capacity and double (8Tb) the memory that previous versions.

* A Docker-certified infrastructure for Docker EE with integrated management and scale tested up to 330 000 Docker containers, allowing developers to compose high-performance applications and embrace a micro-services architecture without latency or scale constraints.

Meanwhile, IBM Storage announced additional enhancements that provide faster performance and simplified cloud connectivity.