There's more information on the new System z10 BC now available here (click on the top graphic):
http://www.ibm.com/systems/z and here: http://www.ibm.com/systems/z/hardware/z10bc Here are some of my thoughts.... The price reductions jump out. Specialty engines (IFLs, zAAPs, and zIIPs), with memory, see their pricing slashed by 50%. And these are much faster engines, so the price-performance improvement is huge. Fastest uniprocessor (Z01 model) appears to be listed as 673 MIPS (up from about 474 on the z9 BC), a +42% improvement. (Insert standard "MIPS" disclaimer here.) It's a z10 processor, so it has the new crypto hardware decimal floating point, large memory pages, etc. ....GIGANTIC NEWS! (Sorry, I'm excited. :-)) The LSPR tables are up now. The Model A01 is 26 MIPS (insert standard disclaimers here), so IBM has held the line on that, offering the same capacity for its smallest customers. But the A01's MSU rating is now 3 (down from 4). Hurray! See, for example, the z/OS 1.9 multi-LPAR table: http://www.ibm.com/systems/z/advantages/management/lspr/index.html MSU ratings are used for software charging by most vendors, including IBM. (IBM already had special A01 software pricing, though.) Your mileage may vary, but this is interesting. There's "technology dividend" throughout the capacity ranges, so, as another important capacity point example, there's an A02 model at about 48 MIPS and only 6 MSUs. There are many, many more capacity models (for z/OS, z/VSE, z/TPF) than the z9 BC. It's now A through Z and 01 through 05, still with no gaps. The capacity steps look a little smaller, so that's good. (More precise control, relevant for any full capacity licensed software.) And there's only one hardware model, so you can start at A01 and go all the way up to Z05 on the same machine. All very convenient. Minimum memory is 4 GB now, but all of that memory is available for use. (There is a dedicated HSA, like the z10 EC.) This is very good for smaller customers with more limited memory demands. Maximum usable memory is 120 GB for now, but IBM says you can go up as high as 248 GB by June, 2009. (So there's a higher density memory part coming, obviously.) There are 10 (faster) main engines available for configuration (up from 7 on the z9 BC), with up to 5 available for z/OS, z/VSE, and/or z/TPF and the others for specialty engines (zAAPs, zIIPs, IFLs, Coupling Facilities). There are no dedicated spares, but if you only configure 9 you have a spare. (Only 8, you have two spares, and so on.) HiperDispatch is supported on this machine, just like its big brother. I/O capabilities are really, really interesting on this new machine. Read through that information for details. In particular, there's some important upgrade capability that's new and will eliminate planned outages. Also, IBM announced some important storage-related enhancements, notably the new "High Performance FICON for System z": http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/25586.wss Details forthcoming on that I assume. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan / Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
