IBM reveals new model - Poughkeepsie Journal

IBM Corp. is announcing today a new line of mainframe computers developed mainly by people working at its Poughkeepsie plant.

IBM’s aim is to keep and expand its leading role in large-enterprise computers, but for people in the mid-Hudson Valley, it stands as a sign that IBM’s 71-year presence in Poughkeepsie remains important to the company.

IBM’s mainframes have been a key part of Dutchess County’s economy for nearly 50 years as they go through periodic upgrades. Despite recent downsizing at the company, mainframe development still keeps thousands of local IBMers and vendors at work building the current models and inventing the next ones.

This model is called the zEnterprise EC12 (or zEC12), and features pumped-up performance and capacity plus features such as better security, the ability to analyze increasing masses of data and the increased ability to handle sudden “bursts” of activity.

IBM made a point to mention Poughkeepsie in the announcement prepared for today, citing an investment by IBM “of more than $1 billion in IBM research and development primarily in Poughkeepsie, New York, as well as 17 other IBM labs around the world and in collaboration with some of IBM’s top clients.”

The microprocessor chips inside the new model are made at IBM’s semiconductor plant in East Fishkill, and are billed as the world’s fastest, running at 5.5 gigahertz, or 5.5 billion cycles, per second. Household electrical power, by comparison, is 60 cycles per second. The processor cores run 25 percent faster than previous models, and the system has 50 percent greater overall capacity. It also uses flash-type memory for the first time in an IBM mainframe.

“Why spend another billion to build another mainframe that’s been out there for 40 years? Our enterprise clients are facing a new set of demands today,” said Douglas Brown, IBM’s vice president for sales for System z and Power Systems, in an interview with the Poughkeepsie Journal.

He said buyers are looking for economically efficient “ways to secure their customers’ data without doubt.” The system is also designed to support “cloud computing,” in which server resources are found and work is done over the Internet.

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Mainframes are hardly consumer items, costing up to six and seven figures. But everyday activity by the ordinary consumer almost certainly goes through a mainframe somewhere, Brown said. It often happens using a credit card or making an online purchase, as banks are among the primary users of mainframes.

Such transactions are growing “at a huge rate” and they are becoming more complex all the time, Brown said.

Brown expects that the new mainframe model will prove better than its predecessors at penetrating two particular markets: retail and health care.

“What it improves is the ability to handle data-intensive workloads,” said Joe Clabby of Clabby Analytics in Yarmouth, Maine, who had been briefed in advance by IBM on the zEC12.

“By being able to process work more quickly, I can get my job done faster,” Clabby said. From the perspective of the employer, it means better use of resources, human and otherwise, than competing systems based on Intel chips’ x86 architecture.

Clabby said IBM had made the new model more attractive for users who want to run mainframes using Linux software, an increasingly popular open-source operating system alternative.

IBM cut the cost of this by 20 percent, he said.

“IBM’s getting even more aggressive at capturing new workloads on the mainframe,” Clabby said.

Mainframe revenues in the second quarter were down by 11 percent overall, the company reported July 18.

But it’s the opposite story in “growth markets,” smaller markets that have only in recent years begun to embrace large computers. There, IBM experienced 11 percent growth in the past year.

IBM’s sales of mainframes have historically showed a cyclical up-and-down, with revenues dropping as the line grows older and buyers wait to see what the next generation brings.

“There’s the big announcement and then you get all the big buyers upfront to get the new capacity,” Clabby said. “Then there’s a pause. It’s a cyclical event for them. I know they’re trying to fix it.”

The systems will be available for order Sept. 12, IBM said. That’s in time to book some sales before the end of the third quarter and help push the fourth quarter into what is historically a big one for IBM.

IBM declined to comment on what impact the announcement has on employment, as has been its policy for years.

But Clabby said it’s good news for Poughkeepsie.