IBM today announced IBM z15, a new enterprise platform delivering the ability to manage the privacy of customer data across hybrid multicloud environments.

Mainframes are the world’s most powerful computers and one of IBM’s signature hardware products. The latest model, called z15, launched Thursday and was designed with extra-secure privacy capabilities to help businesses shift critical data on to multiple cloud networks, known as hybrid cloud.

Through z15, businesses are able to control who can access their data -- and revoke that access at any time. They will also be able to enforce their own internal privacy policies, creating different views of their data for different employees and teams, even if they are using multiple private and public cloud providers, the company said.

Each mainframe is custom-built and can cost anywhere from $500,000 to $3 million, depending on a client’s business requirements. On average, IBM upgrades its mainframe Z system every 2 1/2 years.

With z15, IBM's clients can manage who gets access to data via policy-based controls, with a capability to revoke access to data across the hybrid cloud.

Key z15 features include:

• Encryption Everywhere – Building upon pervasive encryption, IBM unveiled new Data Privacy Passports technology that clients can use to gain control over how data is stored and shared – enabling the ability to protect and provision data and revoke access to that data at any time, not only within the z15 environment but across an enterprise's hybrid multicloud environment. z15 can also encrypt data everywhere – across hybrid multicloud environments – to help enterprises secure their data wherever it travels.
• Cloud-Native Development – Can give clients an advantage by evolving how they modernize apps in place, build new cloud-native apps and securely integrate their most important workloads across clouds.
• Instant Recovery – An approach to limiting the cost and impact of planned and unplanned downtime, enabling users to access full system capacity for a period of time to accelerate shutdown and restart of IBM Z services and provide a temporary capacity boost to rapidly recover from lost time.
  

With z15, IBM's clients can process up to one trillion web transactions a day, support massive databases, and scale-out to 2.4 million Linux containers in a single z15 system — up to 2.3 times more Linux containers per core on a z15 LPAR versus a compared bare-metal x86 platform, running an identical web server load.

They can also address mission-critical latency challenges by delivering up to 30 times lower latency and up to 28 times less CPU utilization on z15 by compressing secure web transaction data before encryption using the Integrated Accelerator for z Enterprise Data Compression instead of using software compression.

The system also offers 12 percent more cores than z14, and 25 percent more memory than z14.

For both planned and unplanned downtime, Instant Recovery brings IBM's clients the ability to unlock the full power of z15, spinning up built-in cores to return to pre-shutdown SLAs, while catching up on business transactions up to 2.5 times faster 11 than previously possible.

In addition to z15, IBM today announced a new high-end, enterprise storage system, the IBM DS8900F designed for mission critical hybrid multicloud environments. The next generation of IBM DS8900F storage system delivers cyber security, data availability and system resiliency. In addition to z15, the IBM DS8900F offers more than 99.99999 percent uptime and several Disaster Recovery options designed for near-zero recovery times to ensure protection of data.