IBM zEnterprise with BladeCenter Extension
This morning, I saw a tweet about a x86 blade being shoved into a zSeries frame.
It appeared to be an IBM Press release introducing new developments in IBM zSeries land. Like tape, mainframe is dead for years (so they say). There are not many analysts that believe this statement, and mainframe is long from being dead. I do see fewer of them however. Only the very large (mostly financial) companies seem to be able to run zSeries workloads because of the expertise and cost involved with running zSeries.
Over the last years, IBM has done a lot of development in mainframe equipment and really has brought down cost of running mainframe gear. For most IT folks, the mainframe has lost its sexiness (if it ever was sexy), and it has gotten really hard to find decent staff to operate mainframe gear and workloads. So in a technical and financial sense, the mainframe might be long from dead, but without good staff, who can run mainframe gear in their shops? I have been seeing a lot of new faces in the IT industry, none of which seem to be developing skills in the mainframe arena.
The open systems world seems to be more exciting because the development is done much faster and cheaper (although I myself might not agree with the cheaper part). Many new developments in the various IT stacks like networking, storage, systems and software are solely targeted at open systems worlds, completely ignoring the mainframe world. The vendors we spoke last week at Tech Field Day also have no plans on developing for mainframe. Part of which is the mainframe vendors own fault, since they have really closed down access to mainframe development resources for everyone.
zEnterprise (z196)
The new zEnterpise will be available later this year, and will hold 96 of the worlds fastest CPU’s running at 5.2 Ghz. It has water-cooling enablement. Funny, because water-cooling was removed around the time I was introduced to the mainframe world, back in 1996. This system is going to have 60% more capacity then its predecessor “System z10″, while consuming about the same amount of energy.
Introducing the BladeCenter Extension.
IBM is also developing gear which is supposed to simplify the data-center. The’d be stupid not to obviously. The BladeCenter extension is a frame that can be attached to the new IBM zEnterprise “main”-frame which will be able to hold a number of “open systems” blades.
” The IBM zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension allows supports purpose IBM POWER7 and System x BladeCenter systems as well as blades optimized for specific workloads, such as analytics and managing Web infrastructure.”
Later this year IBM will be introducing the Power7 blades to run IBM AIX- Next year, xSeries blades will be running Linux OS in this extension.
Using the new Unified Resource Management software, IBM claims to be able to run over a 100,000 virtual machines on a fully configured zEnterprise system.
The mainframe software has a very well deserved reputation of being extremely manageable and configurable and is well known for its stability and predictability. My life in IT once started as a MVS operator, so I always have had a weakness for mainframe environments.
What this will hold for us in the future, who knows, but if IBM manages to gets the virtualization part of the ground including Microsoft Windows workloads, this might be another player in the UCS and VCE arena worth watching, although I sure hope there is a way to run this zEnterprise system without the need of mainframe system engineering skills. If these skills are required to operate this system, I think the market is limited to the current mainframe shops and will pose no threat to the UCS and VCE solutions.
My opinion on this is, unless IBM manages to run this system with the server virtualization features a la VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V they will have a hard time selling this. Even in the shops that already deploy mainframe gear.
The data center convergence question I have for IBM is; when will you join in convergence with “Ficon over Ethernet (FioE)” or in accordance with recent Tech Field Day developments FCoTR?
But I love to be educated on the markets IBM is targeting and how they would be doing that.
