IBM's new z16 mainframe brings AI and cyber resiliency to hybrid cloud

IBM today announced the launch of IBM z16, its next-generation system that brings AI and cyber resiliency to the hybrid cloud using innovative on-chip AI inferencing and industry-first, quantum-safe technologies.

Touted as the industry's first quantum-safe system, IBM z16 is designed to enable clients to analyze real-time transactions, at scale - for mission-critical workloads such as credit card, healthcare and financial transactions. It also is specifically designed to help protect against near-future threats that might be used to crack today's encryption technologies, the company says.

The new system will be generally available onMay 31, 2022.

Below are the key benefits of the new IBM z16 system:

On-chip AI acceleration

The IBM z16 integrates new Artificial Intelligence (AI) acceleration via an on-chip AI coprocessor to reduce latency and deliver outstanding performance for in transaction inferencing.

The IBM Telum dual-processor chip featuring 16 cores delivers increased performance and capacity across a wide range of workloads. The company claims that z16 can process upto 300 billion inference operations/day with just 1ms of latency.

Use cases

• Financial institutions can analyze for fraud during transactions on a massive scale
• Reducing the time and energy required to handle fraudulent transactions on consumers' credit card
• Speed up approval of business or consumer loans
• Clearing and settlement
• Federated learning for retail

Integrated Accelerator for zEDC

The Integrated Accelerator for zEDC improves systems performance for pervasive encryption, so that customers can encrypt 100% of their data, 100%of the time

Data security

With IBM z16 quantum-safe cryptography, businesses can improve their resiliency to current as well as future cyber threats that could evolve with advances in quantum computing.

Modernization of workloads

With IBM z16, you can speed up the modernization of workloads and integrate them seamlessly across the hybrid cloud. The company claims that modernizing and running applications on IBM z16 is as little as 1/2 the OPEX of public clouds.

"IBM is the gold standard for highly secured transaction processing. Now with IBM z16 innovations, our clients can increase decision velocity with inferencing right where their mission-critical data lives," said Ric Lewis, SVP, IBM Systems.

More information can be found here.