z4Live

IBM announced the System z Solution Edition Series - seven integrated hardware, software and services packages that help customers deploy new enterprise workloads, such as data warehousing, electronic payments and disaster recovery.

IBM also announced additional new programs to help more companies lower costs and reduce inefficiency by migrating from Sun and HP servers to the Linux platform on IBM's System z.

These new programs reflect an ongoing IBM strategy to make System z attractive to new workloads so customers can run a much wider range of their business activities with the powerful reliability, transaction-processing capabilities, and management capabilities and efficiencies of the IBM mainframe.

The Solution Edition offerings are designed to make the cost of deploying new workloads on System z price-competitive with alternative distributed systems which may not be as reliable, scalable or secure as an IBM System z Mainframe.

The System z Solution Edition series expands on a successful program for SAP business applications on the IBM mainframe. IBM has experienced significant growth in SAP applications on System z since the program was introduced 18 months ago.

The Solution Edition offerings are affordable complete stack solutions which include IBM System z hardware, IBM middleware products and maintenance programs for new business functions, such as:

• Data warehousing: With the System z Solution Edition for Data Warehousing, customers can deploy new business intelligence applications on System z while helping to avoid the lengthy delays which can be common to acquiring and integrating distributed servers.
• Application development: The System z Solutions Edition for Application Development can help make mainframe deployment of new workloads affordable, simple and accessible to application developers while at the same time facilitating a development environment that is consistent with distributed platforms.
• Disaster recovery: The System z Solutions Edition for GDPS (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex) offers attractive prices on a range of some of the most popular continuous availability and disaster recovery configurations.
• Security: The System z Solution Edition for Enterprise Security can help customers to minimize online security threats for business compliance, centralized enterprise identity and access management, encryption and key management, and fraud analysis.
• Electronic payments: The System z Solution Edition for ACI offers benefits to help customers that run applications from ACI Worldwide, an international provider of software for electronic payment systems. ACI's strategic retail and fraud payments applications are optimized for System z.
• SOA: The System z Solution Edition for WebSphere combines System z technology with IBM's industry-leading WebSphere Application Server for a foundation to build, reuse, run, integrate and manage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications and services.
• The new Solution Edition series also enhances the existing SAP offering, which is designed to provide near-continuous availability and data protection with DB2 for z/OS databases on System z. The solution can now be combined with SAP application deployments for running Linux on the System z platform.

IBM also announced new pricing for its Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) and associated memory to help companies consolidate workloads from siloed, inefficiently used servers onto Linux on the System z platform.

Today's announcement reflects continued investment by IBM in Linux on System z. More than 3,000 of the 5,000 unique applications available on the System z platform are Linux-based. Linux accounted for about half of the roughly 1,000 new or updated applications produced for the IBM mainframe in 2008. More than 40 percent of new System z customers installed Linux last year, and Linux continued to grow over 15 percent during the first half of 2009.

The new Solution Edition Series combined with the recently announced "z Rewards" program now brings competitively priced solutions with financial incentives to help customers take advantage of migration services.

"Now more than ever, companies and institutions are looking for ways to maximize the return on their IT investments," said Karl Freund, vice president of IBM System z strategy and marketing. "The programs announced today offer clients the strengths of System z at prices they are going to love, helping them deploy and consolidate workloads across enterprises and streamline IT infrastructures into a high-performance, energy-efficient environment."

"The Solution Edition Series, part of the Mainframe Charter, which IBM first articulated in 2003 delivers innovative solutions, expands System z's performance and value, and fosters a larger System z community to meet customers' business requirements," added Freund.

IBM's revenue share for servers costing $250,000 or more soared from 17 percent to 32 this decade, according to IDC. Over that same period, HP has remained flat while Sun has lost share.(1)

For more information about System z, please visit http://www.ibm.com/mainframe.