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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.