IBM Announce the zEnterprise zEC12
The next generation of zSeries hardware was announced on Tuesday 28th August. The zEC12 is faster (5.5GHz cores), and will run more processors (up to 101 general purpose) than the previous generations of z. All of this adds up to a nominal reported increase in capacity of 50%. Maximum physical memory is maintained at 3TB but hardware support for 2GB (yes, 2GB) frames has been introduced. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly these are utilised in Java and DB2 – the intended recipients of the feature.
Anyone making use of 1MB frames in DB2 V10 may be interested to know that support has been added for PCIe support for Flash Express – internal solid state disks (SSDs). The initial suggested use is to support paging, but the intention is to support 1MB pageable frames, probably via enabling PTF in z/OS 1.13.
Other highlights from the announcement:
- Hardware System Area (HSA) has been doubled to 32GB
- zBX mode 003. Supporting PS701 BladeCenter Express and BladeCenter HX5 blades to support AIX, Linux on x and Windows workloads, as well as the DataPower XI50z.
- zAware. An analytics function that runs in the firmware to identify inconsistencies and variations in log message profiles and to support early identification of problems.
- Top-exit I/O and power cabling to remove the need for a raised floor.
- Optional rear door with a water cooling heat exchanger.
- New model number is the 2827.
More information is available from IBMs zEC12 portal
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