IBM Announces z16 Mainframe with Telum Processors

IBM z16 mainframe

IBM has announced the launch of IBM z16, a next-generation system with an on-chip AI accelerator that delivers latency-optimized inferencing. IBM z16 integrates their IBM Telum processor into this mainframe offering so clients can infuse AI inferencing for real-time insights.

This innovation will allow clients to monitor real-time transactions at scale for mission-critical workloads including credit card, healthcare, and financial transactions. The IBM z16 is also built to help protect against attacks that might be used to breach today’s encryption solutions in the near future.

The IBM z16 mainframe solution combines AI inferencing with ‘highly secure and reliable’ high-volume transaction processing, thanks to the vendor’s IBM Telum Processor that was announced last year. These have a built-in AI calculating accelerator. Telum is a dual-chip module with sixteen cores made on a 7nm process. IBM z16 is available in a variety of configurations, with up to 200 programmable cores.

IBM employed a highly collaborative, client-centered approach with IBM z16, involving hundreds of people from more than 70 customers, a method that is already being implemented for future IBM mainframe systems.

Fraud Detection Algorithms

Banks can now detect fraud during transactions on a vast scale. IBM says its IBM z16 offering can handle 300 billion inference queries per day with a latency of only one millisecond.

For consumers, this could mean reducing the time and energy required to handle fraudulent transactions on their credit card. For both businesses and card issuers, this might imply a reduction in revenue loss as clients could avoid the annoyance of incorrect declines, which may lead them to use alternative cards in the future.

Other threats, such as tax fraud and organized retail theft, are becoming more difficult to regulate for governments and corporations. Traditional fraud detection algorithms are being pushed to their limits by real-time payments and alternative payment mechanisms such as cryptocurrency. Applying IBM z16’s expanded capabilities to different sectors can help generate a whole new set of use cases, such as:

  • Loan approval – to help expedite the acceptance of business or personal loans
  • Clearing and settlement – to determine which trades and/or transactions may have a high-risk exposure before settlement
  • Federated learning for retail – to better predict the risk of fraud and theft

Quantum-Safe System

In a hybrid cloud environment inclusive of on-premises and public cloud resources, it is critical to protect against today’s threats and posture against cyber criminals who may be stealing data now for decryption later. Building on IBM technologies like as Pervasive Encryption and Confidential Computing, the IBM z16 would take cyber resilience to the next level by safeguarding data against future threats that may emerge as quantum computing evolves.

As a ‘quantum-safe system,’ the IBM z16 is built on lattice-based cryptography, a method for building security primitives that helps safeguard data and systems from existing and future threats. Businesses can future-proof their applications and data now with IBM z16 quantum-safe cryptography.

IBM z16 clients may improve their cyber resilience posture and keep control of their systems with secure boot (which means bad actors can’t implant malware into the boot process to gain control of the system at startup).

In addition, the Crypto Express 8S (CEX8S) hardware security module will provide customers with both classical and quantum-safe cryptographic technologies to assist them handle use cases that need information confidentiality, integrity, and non-repudiation.

Clients may use IBM z16’s secure boot and quantum-safe cryptography to counter potential quantum-computing risks including harvest now, decrypt later assaults, which can lead to extortion, intellectual property theft, and the revelation of other sensitive data. IBM z16 will be generally available as of May 31, 2022.

Modernizing for Hybrid Cloud

IBM has spent the last three years investing heavily in open-source technologies on the IBM zSystems platform and building a unified developer experience throughout the hybrid cloud. These solutions are designed to let IBM clients utilize their existing IT infrastructure, clouds, and applications in a seamless manner, while offering them the flexibility to operate, create, manage, and upgrade cloud native workloads on their preferred architecture.

As part of this endeavour, the following announcements have been made recently:

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Stack – to aid clients in increasing agility and speeding up their transformation, with support for popular open-source projects.

IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center – a digital front door to IBM Consulting’s vast array of tools, training, resources, ecosystem partners, and industry-specific expertise to assist IBM zSystems clients in accelerating the modernization of their applications, data, and processes in an open hybrid cloud architecture.

Tailored Fit Pricing – a full-stack solution that uses cloud-like pricing to enable our clients to swiftly adapt to changes in dynamic workloads and business demands.

Bringing Anaconda to Linux on Z – one example of bringing popular data science frameworks and libraries to these corporate platforms, resulting in a uniform data science user experience across hybrid cloud environments.

Streamlined Support – IBM Technology Support Services provides turnkey support for IBM z16 clients to assist foresee and minimize unexpected downtime, as well as professional services to help enterprises take advantage of the opportunities hybrid technology environments bring.