News

IBM announces mainframes for free trial

IBM has announced to offer a specially priced System z entry-level system to up to five customers in India. Sreenath Chary, Country Sales Head, Z Series, IBM India said that the participating companies may try the System z mainframe for free for up to six months, and then have an option to purchase the machine at a special price of less than $2,00,000. He added that IBM will continue its focus on mid-sized companies in the financial and ISP domains in India. IBM has already sold six Business Class mainframes since its launch in June last year.

IBM has shifted a portion of mainframe development to labs in India, China and Russia to garner greater insight into the unique needs of companies in such emerging markets. The mainframe - which, as recent benchmark tests demonstrated, can process more than 9,000 transactions per second operating on more than marc than 380 million accounts - can handle the most demanding commercial computing workloads. IBM saw a seven per cent growth in revenues last year.

The crash in price barriers for mainframes is now being combined with flexible offers on hardware usage (on demand computing) and open sourcing of the software, said Ray Jones, Vice President, Worldwide zSeries Software Sales, IBM.

The mainframe comes bundled with data solutions services, including installation, configuration, upgrade, and performance/availability assessment for DB2 and IMS databases on the mainframe’s z/OS operating system and on Linux. In addition, IBM will integrate and tune DB2 with software from Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel and other vendors. IBM will also port databases onto DB2 on z/OS and Linux.

New services such as integration, porting and tuning of software; security and encryption; Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) practices and installation for high availability Linux clusters will be delivered via an IBM unit based in Bangalore.