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IBM Pitches EC12 Mainframe at Big Data, Cloud Apps

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The result of more than $1 billion in R&D, IBM has introduced its latest System z mainframe, the EC12 – and it is pitching it at enterprise data and cloud applications.  The mainframe is based on IBM’s proprietary chips, featuring 32 nanometre designs and running at 5.5GHz.  Also included is transactional memory, a variant of standard RAM designed to reduce memory locks for multi-threaded transactional and Java applications.

As well as the main EC12 chips – and the mainframe can be configured with up to 120 chip cores – the systems also incorporates a cryptographic co-processor, for security of highly sensitive data and transactions.

Comparied to its predecessor, the EC12 can run analytics workloads up to 30% faster, and can also support the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator, which incorporates the Netezza data warehouse appliance.  Thus, customers can run complex business analytics and operational analytics on the same platform.

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