MAINFRAMES are SO NOT DEAD: IBM's launched a new one

[steve2470]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/14/big_blues_biggest_iron_yet_is_the_size_of_a_fridge/

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At least twenty years after pundits first pronounced the death of the mainframe, IBM has released a new one.

Of course, the proof of the pudding will be in the market, but IBM will be hoping that the billion dollars it's poured into developing the new z13 mainframe will get the big end of town as excited as Big Blue itself is.

Ensuring that it won't be welcome in the UK after the next election, the z13 has enough grunt to handle “real time encryption of all mobile transactions at any scale” – all the way up to its claimed 2.5 billion transactions a day capacity, presumably.

The theory is that every e-commerce transaction touches off dozens of other system interactions, and that generic Intel-based systems won't scale up to handle them especially as mobility drives up the number of transactions.