Secure the world and even more, with LinuxONE with every core
Whenever a Business Application needs to run highly available, secure, and performant to a large number of users, it is just a perfect fit …
Overview
What is IBM Z?
IBM Z is the company's mainframe enterprise server solution product line.
Recent Reviews
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Solution Planning Senior Manager
Accenture DACH (Information Technology & Services, 10,001+ employees)
Senior Technical Specialist
More than 20 different businesses over 30 years (Information Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees)
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is IBM Z?
The new IBM z15 delivers performance,
flexibility, availability, protection, and agility to drive
digital transformation. It has changed the footprint of IBM Z
with a 19” frame, that scales from one to four frames depending on the
configuration, enabling significant floor space reduction.
IBM z15 has the commercial data privacy and security enforcement solution, Data Privacy Passports, that provides off-platform access revocation. Choose who accesses data, and when and at what level to revoke their access. One hundred percent of data, at-rest and in-flight, is protected with no performance trade off or application changes. With Fibre Channel Endpoint Security working with the latest DS8900F, achieve total end-to-end protection and authentication.
IBM z15 provides flexibility, portability and choice for hybrid cloud deployment. Cloud-native development simplifies life for developers as they build new applications and modernize existing ones. IBM Z supports private and public cloud via Linux, Kubernetes and industry-standard tools. With the Red Hat OpenShift support, IBM z15 adds to the user's options for cloud integration.
Instant recovery reduces the impact of planned and unplanned downtime. All systems need downtime for maintenance, and security patching.
IBM z15 has the commercial data privacy and security enforcement solution, Data Privacy Passports, that provides off-platform access revocation. Choose who accesses data, and when and at what level to revoke their access. One hundred percent of data, at-rest and in-flight, is protected with no performance trade off or application changes. With Fibre Channel Endpoint Security working with the latest DS8900F, achieve total end-to-end protection and authentication.
IBM z15 provides flexibility, portability and choice for hybrid cloud deployment. Cloud-native development simplifies life for developers as they build new applications and modernize existing ones. IBM Z supports private and public cloud via Linux, Kubernetes and industry-standard tools. With the Red Hat OpenShift support, IBM z15 adds to the user's options for cloud integration.
Instant recovery reduces the impact of planned and unplanned downtime. All systems need downtime for maintenance, and security patching.
IBM Z Features
- Supported: Data Privacy Passports
- Supported: IBM Z Data Privacy for Diagnostics
- Supported: IBM Recovery Boost
- Supported: Integrated Accelerator for zEDC
- Supported: Quantum-Safe digital signing algorithms
IBM Z Competitors
IBM Z Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Linux, z/OS, z/VSE, z/TPF, z/VM |
| Mobile Application | No |
IBM Z Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
IBM Z is the company's mainframe enterprise server solution product line.
Dell PowerEdge M and ClearPath Forward Libra are common alternatives for IBM Z.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.1.
The most common users of IBM Z are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(134)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-19 of 19)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 14, 2023
Secure the world and even more, with LinuxONE with every core
Whenever a Business Application needs to run highly available, secure, and performant to a large number of users, it is just a perfect fit for IBM Z. The out of the box virtualisation capabilities are far beyond of any other platform and make even single systems highly available. That helps to reduce costs because we do not need to invest in software solutions to make it HA. And for sure, this makes the handling much easier.
- Virtualization for Scale-Out and Scale-Up in the same footprint
- Security for different workloads: Large Confidential Computing and lightweight Secure Execution
- Performance is a true game changer: extreme throughput powered by amazingly huge caches.
- The one and only FIPS 140-2 Level 4 HSM on this planet
- Quantum Safe Encryption NOW!
- AI infusion to every transaction
- the amount of different pricing metrics is a inhibitor
- the ease of use is really getting better - but still DPM is not available for all workloads
- different pricing schemes for users vs. providers is a pain
September 26, 2023
Best way to process huge data.
IBM Z is used for transaction processing for credit cards.So every real-time transaction is captured and validates the transaction and everyday processing is done on the whole portfolio as part of night Batch processing. New application are also boarded and regular real time service requests regarding the account are processed and response are sent.
September 18, 2023
z/OS - nothing better
We have two computers at our production site and one at our DR site. All computers run z/OS. One system runs a payroll application, and the other runs a provident Fund Application. Both systems provide services to external customers. The computers are connected to an IBM DS9810F storage system and an IBM TS7770 virtual tape system.
- Massive I/O
- Support many users concurrently
- Very little downtime required.
- It's hard finding new people with the required knowledge.
- It seems expensive.
September 12, 2023
Reliable and secured IBM Z
Mainly IBM Z's versatile platform addressed our wide array of business challenges
1. Deployed to cater to the needs of middleware applications.
2. Focused on the modernization of legacy IT systems which are crucial for business operations and user experiences.
3. Custom in-house applications specific to the Next-generation AI and data analytics
4. Deployed mainly focus on business applications that need robust Reliability and Availability.
1. Deployed to cater to the needs of middleware applications.
2. Focused on the modernization of legacy IT systems which are crucial for business operations and user experiences.
3. Custom in-house applications specific to the Next-generation AI and data analytics
4. Deployed mainly focus on business applications that need robust Reliability and Availability.
- Linux on Z applications can seamlessly operate on z/OS, which leverages z/OS operations staff and reuse the z/OS environment.
- Primarily container images with s390x architecture in the Docker Hub can
- be run in z/OS Container Extensions.
- Kafka alongside with ZooKeeper API, benifits from the centralized service that maintains configuration information.
- Unfortunately, there is no provision of morethan one one network interface in each virtual server instance of z/OS systems
- As a limitation at resource sharing, mainly Disks are not able to share between z/OS virtual server instances
- Compression is one of the key feature should be included to support in the PCIe
September 10, 2023
Worth it product by IBM.
IBM Z is used in our organization for large data requirements as it is very versatile and has the capacity to store large amounts of data. We have freedom of choice with the type of data we store and there are scalability options that are inherent with this product from IBM.
- Provided efficient storage for all the data needs.
- Very versatile with old firmware as this has a hybrid open platform.
- This has familiar dev tools for the developers which requires less turnaround time.
- While migrating to cloud there is a slight disruption in network.
- The User Interface can be improved which would make the product more intuitive.
- Detailed documentation with the product guide related to migration will be much appreciated.
April 13, 2023
The exclusive partner for IBM Z in the GCC recommends the mother of all servers for your enterprise needs
While my organization is an IBM Partner and we sell IBM Z to customers, we are a IBM Z user ourselves. Many of our internal workflow applications run on the mainframe platform and it has been supporting us for over a decade without having to take a downtime or even an upgrade. Reliability, Security and Scalability are the salient features of the platform. Getting it operational and forget it, it will run the company's business critical applications for you.
- Availability - Runs non disruptively 24x7
- Reliability - Never had to take an outage or unplanned downtime . Even it planned outage scenarios, it demonstrates high reliability, even though the platform is over a decade old now
- Scalability - It runs at close to 100% utilization levels and never hangs or crashes
- Security - Not even a single instance of it being hacked
- IBM marketing of its capabilities need to improve
- With such a great product, the industry perception is it being proprietary and expensive which needs to be clarified
- Many applications are still not available on the platform to make it mainstream and much more is the perception
January 02, 2023
IBM Z is the best among others
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Currently, the project we are working on in our team/company uses IBM servers, specifically IBM Z. This is also one of our customer's requirements and we want to do everything on IBM Z servers. We handle it ourselves. Very helpful in terms of service support. We have been using it for almost 7 months. The overhead of running workloads and copying data has been reduced. Its AI is the main thing that makes the decisions made practically realistic and increases the efficiency of work. This is one of the best I've seen from IBM. This is really great. So far, we haven't had many issues and no incidents requiring fines. He is one of IBM's great products.
- Usually it's fast when compared to other virtual power systems and low latency, hassle-free
- Speed and availability
- Effective and powerful
- Delay and data retrieval
- Connecticvity sometimes
November 30, 2022
Cloud at your premises
Reliable server which never fails, and has great disaster recovery offerings, is the definition of virtualisation, hence "the" cloud itself.
Yes, this is the mainframe, and yes, I am a mainframer.
Yes, this is the mainframe, and yes, I am a mainframer.
- Virtualisation
- Total cost of ownership
- Reliability
- User interfaces
- Customer education
- Customer relations
November 16, 2022
IMS on z/OS provides speedy transactions and high availability
Ericsson (formerly Telcordia) provides IMS DB/TM-based inventory systems for very large phone companies. Although primarily IMS-based, we use IMS Connect, DB2, and MQ as well. We make extensive use of MQ and IMS Connect to allow access to our systems for users beyond just the 3270 world. We transformed all our 3270 green screens with our Xj (JAVA eXtensions) product so our users have the advantage of a modern interface. MQ is used to interface with both our other systems that run on other platforms (UNIX, LINUX, etc) as well as an interface to other phone company systems not written by Ericsson.
- I/O is very fast in IMS and outside of IMS as well
- CPU speeds are as fast as any other platform
- User interfaces remain fairly constant (TSO, IMS, DB2, MQ, etc)
- Support is good, but more examples, especially of non-Z/os things like JAVA, would be helpful
- Security is becoming so prevalent it's cumbersome at times.
- Less emphasis on exits coded in BAL/ASM and more parmlib/proclib members would be helpful
September 17, 2022
A great software design for hybrid cloud, it has great security, keeps our files very safe.
It is trustable and grants high availability, which is very appropriate for managing different conversion processes like inventory and billing. Server trustability and can accumulate huge amounts of data. At first, it is challenging to learn, and we see that it is a high-priced platform; the command line interface should be upgraded, which makes it user-friendly and it is beneficial.
- Its efficiency and performance, It is trustable.
- IBM Z frame series mainframe system is like a skilled in the industry, protected, and it can do anything, almost distribute a lot of benefits in various sections.
- It has an affinity with a lot of modern technology as well.
- Difficult to learn at first.
- high prices.
- The Command line interface should be upgraded.
September 08, 2022
Precise Solution for System Automation and Application Support.
IBM Z delivers on digital transformation, where it delivers high performance and perfect protection, among others, to increase the validity of the business functionality. Besides, IBM Z focuses on data privacy, where reputable security is deployed, and access measures are deployed for correct individuals. The program has excellent flexibility, which allows both on-premise and cloud usage, which increases the convenience of the users.
- IBM Z has a perfect data privacy, which allows normal business functionality.
- Besides, flexibility of the tool increases swift functionality in digital transformation.
- Finally, the endpoint security is well articulated by IBM Z.
- IBM Z has complexity issue, where it burdens new users.
- IBM Z is pricey, and this challenges business users who are financially discouraged.
- Finally, IBM Z has poor recovery measures, where data privacy can be a challenge.
August 06, 2019
IBM Z Review of Actual Experiences by Destiny Corporation
IBM Z is used across many functions of the organizations we support. It handles transactional processes such as billing, CRM, claims, and other types of data entry functions. In addition, it is used for advanced analytics when the data is stored in databases and data warehouses that support this style of processing. It is also an extremely secure platform as both Z and Z Linux are not standard targets for hackers. Even their design offers no single admin user ID. As Donna Dillenberger of IBM Research said in a recent presentation 'We know better'.
- Transactional processing, including data entry across multiple departments
- Reporting on massive amounts of data, due to its scale and size of processing capabilities
- Analytics on data as there are various accelerators for both IBM's databases and others such as Oracle
- Security is another major benefit to this platform as it contains a non-open systems design
- It would be good if IBM could demonstrate more use cases for Z to potential clients
- A migration strategy from Open Systems to Z would be helpful
- Any additional marketing to could explain the benefits of Z/Linux, especially now that RedHat is in the mix.
May 02, 2019
IBM Z - Nice
As a credit union, we use IBM Z for all online transactions and batch processing, including on-line web interface and mobile transactions.
- On-line CICS transactions
- Batch processing
- More graphical user interface for newer Sysprogs
May 01, 2019
Znation
IBM Z is being used in the Managed Services department within my company. It provides services for financial institutions, airlines etc..
- IBM Z has the best security for data
- It operates 24/7
- It has zero downtime
- Implement a powerful tool for GUI so users can do more
May 01, 2019
IBM z is the way to go
I work for a software company that develops software for system Z
- Fast computing experience
- Highly secure
- Very reliable
- Needs better UI
- Need training for new users
- Better pricing
April 30, 2019
IBM Z is the only way
My company uses IBM Z across the whole organization in the sense that most of our data is stored there. We have tons of applications that run on Z and we have developers who are trained on Z and support our business users.
- The processing power and speed that Z provides is unparalleled.
- The security of the data that resides on Z is unlike any other system.
- For application developers, Z can sometimes be hard to understand, especially for younger users.
- I'd like to see some type of built in support function for some of the products
February 22, 2019
Z enterprise stacks up against the competition
IBM Z Enterprise is being used across our whole organization and has solved business problems in many server issues that would require continuous maintenance support
- It handles large amounts of data easily
- No maintenance required to uphold
- Ease of deployment and use
- Access to multiple admin
- Giving permissions
- Space to fix issues
IBM Z Series Enterprise Servers provide the power and reliability needed for the largest organizations to drive large numbers of transactions and gain insight from their data. If you are looking for a platform with high availability that can scale on demand and deliver performance with optimal security, these things are second nature to mainframe computer systems and applications.
The mainframes I have worked on are typically used across the whole organization to address the enterprise business needs of the organization. They run multiple applications for multiple business lines.
The mainframes I have worked on are typically used across the whole organization to address the enterprise business needs of the organization. They run multiple applications for multiple business lines.
- Security is a specific strength of the Z platform. The IBM z14 provides Pervasive Encryption, making the platform one of the most secure hardware offerings available. Specialized cryptographic hardware is utilized to encrypt data and protect encryption keys, enabled through integration with a tamper-responding cryptographic HSM. The IBM z14 pervasively protects all application and database data, without interrupting business applications and operations, all the time, at any scale. True end-to-end data protection is provided for all in-flight network data and APIs. Imagine being able to protect all your data and applications without requiring IT or programmer action. With the z14 this becomes reality instead of imagination.
- IBM offers flexible pricing options to make it easier for customers to affordably adopt and utilize the Z enterprise servers for any type of workload that needs to be run. For example, with Container Pricing, customers can identify workload to containers and pay for them independently of any other workload at a reduced price. Container Pricing is an important breakthrough for mainframe customers because it offers competitive economics versus alternative platforms such as public clouds and on-premises x86 servers.
- The IBM z14 delivers high-end processing power and enhanced I/O capabilities. The latest model, the z14, offers increases in the performance of the individual PUs (processor units), increases in the number of PUs per system, a redesigned system cache, and an increase in the amount of memory possible.
- The system is capable of running more than 12 billion encrypted transactions per day on a single system. And the IBM z14 delivers industry leading scale to meet the needs of modern connected workloads. It can run a million Docker containers on single platform.
- The mainframe and z/OS have a long history of providing critical business value with transaction processing systems like CICS and IMS. And the transactions processed by these systems are often backed by DB2 and IMS databases. The applications and databases hosted on mainframe systems provide a rich tapestry of useful information that mobile users want to access.
- And mobile devices can connect to the System z platform consistently and effectively. With z/OS Connect the mainframe can use a single interface on z/OS that accepts standard mobile protocols and formats that can interact with multiple systems on the mainframe.
- The Z platform provides a superior platform for analytics & machine learning for continuous intelligence across the enterprise. The Machine Learning on Z platform, delivered in 2017, offers an agile machine learning solution that enables customers to convert enterprise data into opportunity. With machine learning on an IBM z14 you can optimize your decision processes by quickly training, deploying and continuously monitoring a high volume of high quality predictive behavioral models. The IBM z14 can also rapidly analyze large volumes of data with consistent response times by exploiting the additional memory and faster processors of the z14.
- Modern development techniqes and languages can be used, in addition to legacy systems. And Linux can be run on enterprise Z servers just as easily as z/OS.
- And the platform excels at traditional, transactional workloads, both online and in batch, using database systems, flat files, or VSAM.
- IBM needs to add more focus on simplifying mainframe usage and management.
- Most modern programmers interface with the Z using an IDE. However, performing many tasks, such as cataloging a data set or checking on a job status, can require switching to the ISPF interface. Users want to interface with a GUI, not a function-key, menu and character-based interface like ISPF. Anything that can simplify and modernize interfacing with the mainframe should be a high priority for IBM.
- The IBM Z platform is one of the most instrumented computing platforms in the world, so there are a lot of metrics that could be automatically analyzed and used to improve the performance and management of the mainframe environment.
February 14, 2019
Scalable, Secure, Available — Computing for the Enterprise
We provide a shared infrastructure for multiple departments. The business problems are varied and based on the department. Examples are DMV, and various other departments, many health and welfare related.
- Security. TLS can be easily deployed to new applications via the Configuration Assistant.
- High Workload. We typically have tens of thousands of users logged in at a time, and this is not a problem at all.
- High Availability. With DDVIPA, we are able to utilize multiple LPARs to access the same underlying applications, even if a particular LPAR is unavailable.
- Complexity. Many needs are common (telnet, FTP, etc). It would be nice if those were simpler to deploy.
- User interface. Green screens aren’t interesting to younger programmers.
- Built-in fault finding heuristics would be nice. It is difficult to see problems through the noise.