IBM (NYSE: IBM) yesterday announced a new mainframe that the company says represents the most significant upgrade in two decades. The zEnterprise 196 was designed to cut data center costs and complexity, and is the recipient of some $1.5 billion in R&D as well as input from 30 of its customers. Where raw processing power is concerned, the zEnterprise consists of 96 quad processors running at 5.2 GHz each. In a nutshell, this makes it 60 percent faster than the z10 series it supersedes; all the while using the same amount of power.

In addition, the use of the BladeCenter Extension module will allow IBM's Power7 or x86-based general purpose blade servers to be integrated with the System Z, allowing the blade systems to be managed as part of the mainframe from the central console. In this manner, a total of 114 blades with eight cores can be added to perform specific tasks such as analytics and web infrastructure management.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at Computerworld
- check out the article at ZDNet
- check out the article at InformationWeek

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