IBM lowers price points with new midrange mainframe

by Lawrence Casiraya

June 7, 2006 —

IBM Corp. announced Tuesday a new mainframe server geared towards the midrange market, lowering the price tag for its specialized processors designed to consolidate application workloads.

IBM announced the availability of its System z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP), which can consolidate databases as well as applications such as enterprise resource planning and business intelligence on a single platform, when it launched the System z9 Enterprise Class mainframe in January.

The same set of hardware accelerators, along with two others called Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) and zSeries Application Assist Processors (zAAP) designed to speed up Linux and Java applications, respectively, are also available for the newer z9 Business Class mainframe models.

IBM charges a one-time fee of US$95,000 for a single-engine processor, lower than the previous $125,000 it announced when it launched the higher-end z9 Enterprise Class mainframe.

These new IBM mainframes also allow users to extend

Computerworld Singapore