ZSeries Overview

Technology has always accelerated the pace of change. New technologies enable new ways of doing business, shifting markets, changing customer expectations, and redeﬁ ning business models. Each major enhancement to technology presents opportunities. Companies that under- stand and prepare for changes can gain advantage over competitors and lead their industries.

Customers of every size, and in every industry are looking for ways to make their businesses more resilient in the face of change and uncertainty. They want the ability to react to rapidly changing market conditions, manage risk, outpace their competitors with new capabilities and deliver clear returns on investments.

Welcome to the on demand era, the next phase of e-business, in which companies move beyond simply integrating their processes to actually being able to sense and respond to ﬂ uctuating market conditions and provide products and services to customers on demand. While the former notion of on demand as a utility capability is a key component, on demand companies have much broader capabilities.

What does an on demand company look like?

•Responsive: It can sense and respond in real time to the changing needs of customers, employees, suppliers and partners

•Variable: It must be capable of employing variable cost structures to do business at high levels of productivity, cost control, capital efﬁ ciency and ﬁ nancial predictability.

•Focused: It concentrates on its core competencies – areas where it has a differentiating advantage – and draws on the skills of strategic partners to manage needs outside of these competencies.

•Resilient: It can handle the ups and downs of the global market, and manage changes and threats with consis- tent availability, security and privacy – around the world, around the clock.

To support an on demand business, the IT infrastructure must evolve to support it. At its heart the data center must transition to reﬂ ect these needs; the data center must be responsive to changing demands, it must be variable to support the diverse environment, it must be ﬂ exible so that applications can run on the optimal resources at any point in time, and it must be resilient to support an always open for business environment.

The on demand era plays to the strengths of the IBM ^® zSeries®. The IBM ^zSeries 900

(z900) was launched in 2000 and was the ﬁ rst IBM server "designed from the ground up for e-business." The latest member of the family, the IBM ^zSeries 990 (z990), brings enriched functions that are required for the on demand data center.

The "responsive" data center needs to have systems that are managed to the quality of service goals of the business; they need systems that can be upgraded transparently to the user and they must be adaptable to the changing requirements of the business. With the zSeries you have a server with high levels of reliability and a balanced design to ensure high levels of utilization and consistently high service to the user. The capacity on demand features con- tinue to evolve, helping to ensure that upgrading the servers is timely and meets the needs of your business. It’s not just the capacity of the servers that can be changed on demand, but also the mix of workload and the allocation of resources to reﬂ ect the evolving needs and priorities of the business.