The Next Wave in Data Center Transformation: IBM zEnterprise
Andreas Zilch
IT organizations are caught between two competing forces: the need to rapidly develop new business applications and rapidly expand into new markets, while at the same time being a focal point for reducing company costs. Most IT executives find it impossible to reconcile these forces. New applications are usually implemented quickly by placing them on new sets of hardware and software that do not necessarily integrate with the existing environment, which increases acquisition and management costs and reduces flexibility. On the other hand, reducing the number of systems in an environment and reducing personnel support usually results in an increased time to deploy applications, longer system maintenance outages, and reduced application performance.
The reality of developing and managing enterprise data centers is the need to have high performing applications running in mixed environments, with high security and low costs. Most distributed platforms do not have the ability to meet these challenging requirements. However, it is clear that new IBM System zEnterprise directly addresses these requirements in a way that allows IT to transform data centers from risky cost centers to stable, dynamic environments that serve as compelling business multipliers. IBM zEnterprise 196 is a preferred target system for a majority of enterprise applications. It can handle database intensive applications, new Linux-based, Java and XML-based applications and data, as well as redefine new performance levels for legacy batch processing, allowing continuous batch operations. Because of the ability to both isolate application environments for security and development as well as facilitate application integration, System zEnterprise has lower costs throughout the application business lifecycle.