From InfoWorld: IBM took the wraps off a new mainframe computer on Tuesday, promising it will help customers to detect more fraud in real time and plow through billions of transactions generated each day by smartphones and tablets.
The z13 is IBM's first new mainframe in almost three years, and it shows the company continuing to invest in a product that's still relied upon heavily by banks, airlines and other big firms, while logging steadily lower sales each year.
The z13 gets a new processor design, faster I/O and the ability to address up to 10TB of memory -- three times as much as its predecessor. It can house up to 141 processor units in a single system and run as many as 8,000 virtual servers, the company says.
IBM recently celebrated the mainframe's 50th anniversary, and one of the reasons it's still going -- even as IBM sells off its x86 server business -- is that IBM keeps refreshing it to handle new computing tasks.
"It screams on traditional workloads like OLTP (online transaction processing), but we've also designed the z13 for the explosive growth in mobile," said Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM's mainframe group.
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