Josef “Jeff” Sipek

I’m rather late with this post, but here it goes anyway. In August 2010, IBM announced a new mainframe — the zEnterprise 196.

At first, I wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a z10 replacement, or if it was an entry level system like the  Multiprise was back in the ESA/390 days. It turns out that it is a z10 replacement.

The system looks like a z10 from the outside, on the inside it’s different of course.

The specs for a fully configured system are:

• 80 customer cores @ 5.2GHz (96 cores total, the 16 extra ones take care of system stuff as well as provide spare cores for failover)
• 3TB of memory (z10 has 1.5TB limit)

The big new thing is the addition of the zBX. Now, it is possible to have your mainframe hooked up to several POWER (and soon x86) BladeCenters working as one system. I don’t really know much about how this part of the system works, but it sure looks interesting.