To meet the growing demands of mobile consumers, IBM unveiled the z13, the first mainframe designed for the growth of the mobile app economy. According to IBM, the new system delivers scale and economics together with real-time encryption and analytics to help meet the expectations of consumers for speed and safety for trillions of transactions in the mobile economy. The z13 system culminates a $1 billion investment, 5 years of development, leverages the innovation of more than 500 new patents and represents a collaboration with over 60 clients.
“Every time a consumer makes a purchase or hits refresh on a smart phone, it can create a cascade of events on the back end of the computing environment," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems. "The z13 is designed to handle billions of transactions for the mobile economy. Only the IBM mainframe can put the power of the world's most secure datacenters in the palm of your hand. Consumers expect fast, easy and secure mobile transactions. The implication for business is the creation of a secure, high performance infrastructure with sophisticated analytics."
As part of the announcement, IBM also unveiled a preview its new z/OS software, designed to deliver advanced analytic and data-serving capabilities. When available, this new operating system will expand the ability of z13 to process in-memory analytics and provide analysis on mobile transactions, helping clients to further extend mainframe enterprise applications to the mobile user.
The new z13 mainframe is the first system able to process 2.5 billion transactions a day, IBM said. This is the equivalent of 100 Cyber Mondays every day of the year. IN addition, the company said z13 transactions are designed to be persistent, protected and auditable from end-to-end, a requirement for the mobile space, in which mobile transactions are expected to grow up to 40 trillion mobile transactions per day by 2025.
The z13 also is intended to make practical real-time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale. The system includes 500 new patents, including cryptographic encryption technologies that enable more security features for mobile initiated transactions.
The z13 is also the first mainframe system with embedded analytics, helping to provide real-time insights on all transactions, IBM said. This capability is intended to enable clients to run real-time fraud detection on 100 percent of their business transactions by delivering on-the-fly analytic insights.
According to IBM, as mobile adoption grows, consumers are driving larger numbers of mobile transactions because each mobile transaction triggers a cascade of events including comparisons to past purchases, data encryption and decryption, bank-to-bank reconciliations, and customer loyalty discounts. This cascade of events causes a so-called “starburst effect” – where a single transaction can trigger as few as four or as many as 100 additional system interactions, creating security vulnerabilities at each interaction point. When combined with IBM MobileFirst solutions, the z13 is engineered to deliver enhanced performance, availability, analytics and security, the company said.
For more information on z13 and the IBM z Systems portfolio, visit ibm.com/systems/z.