Indeed, software improvements are one of the major changes coming with the new mainframe, RedMonk analyst James Governor said. IBM is including more data management software with the z990, a move that puts pressure on mainframe software sellers, Governor said. "IBM is aggressively trying to kick out Computer Associates, Compuware and BMC, by providing good enough functionality at about half the price," Governor said. The move addresses one of the barriers to growth of mainframe use, the high software cost, he added. "It's been third-party tools that have prevented the growth of the platform in many cases," Governor said. And IBM is trying to make mainframe management less arcane, with tools that work the same for several IBM server lines, Governor said. The z990 can run modern software. It's certified to run version 1.3 of Java 2 Enterprise Edition, Governor said, and includes support for Web services standards that are part of J2EE 1.4, such as Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol) and UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration). The new mainframe will have quadruple the input-output (I/O) ability of its predecessor, important for maintaining a stronghold for tasks such as extracting information from databases. "You see mainframes shining at tasks where...there is a huge amount of I/O," Haff said. The plan to support as many as 64 processors in the z990 has a caveat, however: a single operating system can't always take advantage of all the processors. When the 48-processor version arrives, the maximum partition size for a single copy of the operating system will be 32 processors, and when the 64-processor model arrives, the maximum partition size will be 48 processors, Haff said. And as previously reported, the new mainframe will come with "on-off capacity-on-demand" features, which will let customers rent extra processing power temporarily. IBM made the debut of the on-off feature with its pSeries Unix servers last week.
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