At a Thursday lunch event in New York, IBM announced the release of a new System z mainframe – the zEnterprise 196 – which the company’s top executives described as the “system of systems”, as it enables users to manage the mainframe, and Power and x86 chips in a blade environment by means of the mainframe’s console.

Noting that the new zEnterprise 196 is a hybrid machine that essentially brings mainframe attributes to distributed systems, Steve Mills, the chief of the Software Group, and Rod Adkins, Senior VP of IBM’s Systems and Technology unit, said at the launch event that the zEnterprise 196 is an effective combination of new quad-core processor, several other new technologies, Power7 and x64 blades.

Elaborating that the core of the zEnterprise 196 – which supports z/OS, Linux and AIX operating systems – is a significantly upgraded mainframe, Adkins said: “This is a bigger, badder, bolder machine. This is really the industry's first multi-architecture platform.”

Technically speaking, the z196 processor delivers nearly 1,200 MIPS per engine and almost 50,000 MIPS in a single system image across 80 cores. Boasting 15 different subcapacity configurations, the zEnterprise
196 machines, which will likely start shipping on September 10, will have five different models: M15, M32, M49, M66, and M80.

According to Adkins, the development of the zEnterprise 196 entailed $1.5-billion expenditure in research and development; and witnessed the participation of over 5,000 IBMers working from 18 different labs, as well as 30 key mainframe customers.