If you consider mainframes, you in all probability have a psychological image from an previous film, with punch playing cards and a pc that takes up a complete giant room. However the mainframe nonetheless lives, and is a viable product at IBM. Immediately, it’s a lot sleeker and extra highly effective, and helps run data-intensive workloads for the world’s greatest industries, with use circumstances that may not be fairly prepared for the cloud.
Immediately IBM unveiled the most recent mainframe in its storied historical past, the z16. It runs on the IBM Telum processor, which the corporate launched final summer time. The chip has been optimized to run large workloads, processing 300 billion high-value monetary transactions per day with only one millisecond of latency, in line with the corporate.
That’s for purchasers who’ve a severe want for velocity with heavy quantity. The first use case the corporate is promoting for this monster machine is real-time fraud prevention. Monetary establishments specifically are the goal clients, however Ric Lewis, SVP for IBM methods, says it’s for nearly any firm processing lots of business-critical transactions.
“It’s nonetheless banking, insurance coverage, public sector, authorities, healthcare, retail — anyplace the place you actually have excessive transaction throughput, the place you want safety, reliability and the world’s finest transaction processing,” Lewis mentioned.
That comes right down to the most important firms on the earth, together with two-thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world’s prime 50 banks, eight of the highest 10 insurers, seven of the highest 10 world retailers and eight out of the highest 10 telcos, that are utilizing mainframes, in line with information supplied by IBM. Most of these machines come from IBM.
“What’s cool about this newest announcement is we’ve now built-in AI inferencing notably optimized for fraud detection in actual time contained in the chip,” he mentioned. The distinction right here is that there’s often a lag between the fraud being detected and the buyer studying about it. IBM desires to vary that with the z16. “Now, that set of consumers can entry information [that fraud could be occurring] in actual time contained in the chip. It’s all enabled by our personal VLSI chip referred to as Telum that we introduced final [year], however this would be the first system transport with that chip.”
Lewis says that whereas the cloud has been nice for the business, he believes there’s a complete class of firms and purposes the place the cloud simply isn’t a viable choice, and for some proportion of these, a robust mainframe just like the z16 might be the reply.
“There was a time when individuals would say that every thing goes to finish up within the cloud, and I believe what you’re seeing extra not too long ago is individuals believing information is in every single place. It’s not all going to be within the cloud. And actually the evolution of the entire compute panorama is extra in the direction of specialised infrastructure,” he mentioned.
And naturally, in Lewis’ view that entails specialised {hardware} like his firm’s z16. The corporate’s mainframe gross sales had been down 6% as of its most up-to-date earnings report, however clients may need been ready for the know-how recycle that comes with this announcement earlier than shopping for any extra models.
The corporate mentioned that the z16 shall be obtainable for all clients on Could thirty first, and it might be a take a look at of Lewis’ view that some workloads will stay in a personal information heart working on mainframes for a while to come back.