IBM Unveils Mainframe BundlesIBM Unveils Mainframe Bundles

IBM introduced hardware and software packages to help companies consolidate and virtualize workloads on the System z mainframe.

The latest products, introduced Tuesday, include two new mainframes priced and configured for large data center consolidation, IBM said. The company also introduced a new System z Solution Edition for running Chordiant customer relationship management applications.

The two new System z configurations for application consolidation can run hundreds of Linux virtual servers on IBM's z/VM virtualization platform. The systems come with a "save-as-you-grow" pricing model in which incremental capacity is priced significantly lower as the configuration size increases, IBM said.

The System z Chordiant Solution Edition includes the z/OS, DB2 database and WebSphere middleware. The package supports the collocation of Chordiant applications with customer data on System z.

To date, IBM has introduced eight System z Solution Editions for a variety of applications, including data warehousing, application development, disaster recovery, security, electronic payments, SAP applications, cloud computing and service oriented architecture (SOA).

After seeing System z sales plummet in the economic recession, IBM in August started offering packages of integrated hardware, software and services that tailored the mainframe to specific application workloads.

IBM continues to position the System z as an alternative to computing clusters of commodity x86 servers. More than 3,000 of the 6,300 applications available overall on the System z are Linux based.

"IBM is seeing a new market trend for large scale server consolidation and bringing more capabilities to the mainframe," Tom Rosamilia, general manager of System z at IBM, said in a statement.

The worldwide server market has been hit hard in the economic recession. In the third quarter revenue fell 17.3% year over year to $10.4 billion, according to IDC. IBM and Hewlett-Packard tied in revenue market share, but both suffered steep year-to-year declines -- 12.9% and 16.8%, respectively.

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