IBM Unfurls New Flagship High-End Systems

IBM Tuesday began shipping its new flagship servers.

IBM Tuesday began shipping its new flagship eServer mainframe, the z990, and the new-and-improved p690 server.

The eServer z990 mainframe and the eServer p690 server with Power4+ microprocessors are now shipping to in volume and on schedule.

Big Blue has positioned the two systems to address customer demand for more economic, open-standards-based solutions that will drive cost saving consolidations, higher resource utilization, and complex secure transactions.

To meet this need, both servers will offer IBM’s “on/off capacity on demand” to enable enterprises’ systems to respond to the variable requirements of their business.

The eServer p690 runs Linux or AIX and supports 32 dynamic partitions. It can support thousands of virtual Linux servers in a single box, with processing power up to 11,000 transactions per second.

With the release of these two servers, IBM is aiming to demonstrate continued momentum in a server market where competitors are losing share.

“These systems allow customers to apply real innovation and superior technology to their business operations for improved security, efficiency and responsiveness,” said Mark Shearer, vice president, IBM Systems Group. “With these announcements, we continue to accelerate the delivery of breakthrough technology across the portfolio of systems from mainframes and Unix servers to storage systems and blades.”

The IBM eServer zSeries 990 will be the new flagship of the eServer family. It is the result of a four-year, $1 billion plus investment in the zSeries platform involving 1,200 IBM developers.

IBM boasts of its use of breakthrough technology and how it has rewritten the rules for enterprise-class computing with fortress-like security, rock-solid reliability, and extreme performance in Linux virtualization and automation.

At least one company is already listening. Farmers Insurance Group, the third largest writer of passenger automobile and homeowner’s insurance in the United States, plans to use the eServer z990 and IBM’s WebSphere middleware as the backbone of its new Web-based claims processing system.

The eServer p690 with Power4+ chip technology has also already shipped to several customers, including The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center and The National Weather Service.

Among the enhancements in this new-and-improved eServer is a POWER4+ processor with a speed of 1.7 GHz, twice the high-performance memory capacity, and a new I/O subsystem with nearly triple the I/O bandwidth. The eServer p690 also doubles LPAR support to the processor level.

The eServer p690 is designed to offer enterprises a highly efficient platform for both server consolidation and large, single-system applications.