When you think of mainframes, you probably think of an old movie with punch cards and a computer that takes up a large room. The mainframe is a viable product at IBM. Today, it's much sleeker and more powerful, and helps run data-intensive workloads for the world's biggest industries, with use cases that might not be ready for the cloud.
The newest mainframe in IBM's history, the z16, was unveiled today. The IBM Telum processor was released last summer. The chip has been designed to process 300 billion high-value financial transactions per day with just one millisecond of lag.
Customers with a serious need for speed with heavy volume can get that. Real-time fraud prevention is the primary use case for this monster machine. The target customers for IBM systems are financial institutions, but the system is only for any company that processes a lot of business-critical transactions.
It's still banking, insurance, public sector, government, healthcare, retail, and the world's best transaction processing.
The largest companies in the world include two-thirds of the Fortune 100, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers and eight out of the top 10 telcos. IBM makes most of the machines.
In 1955, a female office worker sorts punch cards as two men talk near the console of an IBM 705 III mainframe computer owned by the US Army. There is a photo of a person
He said that the latest announcement is cool because it has integrated artificial intelligence for fraud detection in real time inside the chip. There is usually a lag between when the fraud is detected and when the consumer learns about it. IBM wants to change that with the z16. This system will be the first to ship with the Telum chip that we announced last year.
The cloud has been great for the industry, but there are a lot of companies and applications that are not viable in the cloud, and a powerful mainframe like the Z16 could be the answer.
There was a time when people said that everything would end up in the cloud, and now that is not the case. It isn't all going to be in the cloud. He said that the evolution of the compute landscape is more towards specialized infrastructure.
Lewis has a view that involves specialized hardware. Customers might have been waiting for the technology recycle that comes with this announcement before buying any additional units, as the company's mainframe sales were down 6% as of its most recent earnings report.
The company said that the z16 will be available for all customers on May 31st, and that it could be a test of Lewis' view that some workloads will remain in a private data center running on mainframes for some time to come.
The mainframe business is alive and well, as IBM announces new z15
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