Tuesday, April 8th 2025
IBM Announces z17, The First Mainframe Fully Engineered for the AI Age
IBM today announced the IBM z17, the next generation of the company's iconic mainframe, fully engineered with AI capabilities across hardware, software, and systems operations. Powered by the new IBM Telum II processor, IBM z17 expands the system's capabilities beyond transactional AI capabilities to enable new workloads.
IBM Z is built to redefine AI at scale, positioning enterprises to score 100% of their transactions in real-time. z17 enables businesses to drive innovation and do more, including the ability to process 50 percent more AI inference operations per day than z16.2 The new IBM z17 is built to drive business value across industries with a wide range of more than 250 AI use cases, such as mitigating loan risk, managing chatbot services, supporting medical image analysis or impeding retail crime, among others.
IBM z17 is the culmination of five years of design and development which included the filing of more than 300 patent applications filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office. Designed with the direct input of more than 100 clients and in close collaboration with IBM Research and Software teams; the new system introduces multi-model AI capabilities, new security features to protect data, and tools that leverage AI for improving system usability and management:
IBM z17 is a system designed from the ground up to fully integrate into hybrid environments by tightly joining hardware innovations, software capabilities for AI, and rich support for open-standards and tooling. This enables differentiated performance and reliability while reimagining how developers and systems operators engage with and manage IBM Z, including:
IBM z17 furthers the platform's history of strong security and resiliency capabilities. New developments in AI have enabled the deployment of added intelligence across this ever-growing area of importance for clients as new threats appear every day. This includes several new capabilities, including:
IBM's tailored, comprehensive support experience helps IBM Z clients meet demands beyond traditional maintenance. Delivered by IBM Technology Lifecycle Services, IBM Support for z17 helps clients optimize their environments for peak performance to address risk and disruptions for mission-critical operations. IBM's AI processes streamline incident remediation and help improve case resolution time, built on IBM watsonx, now support IBM Z systems.
IBM Delivers Secured and Agile Storage
IBM Storage DS8000 plays a key role as an integrated storage solution for IBM Z. The latest generation of IBM Storage DS8000 (10th Generation) is designed to harness the full power of IBM z17, providing organizations access to critical workloads, consistent and optimized data performance, and a modular architecture to adopt the latest IBM research-backed technologies to fuel business growth while monetizing data. Together, IBM Z and IBM Storage offer a modern infrastructure delivering a secured and agile platform for mission-critical workloads.
Availability
IBM z17 will be generally available June 18, 2025 For more information, visit IBM.com/z17. The IBM Spyre Accelerator is expected to be available starting in Q4 2025.
Source:
IBM
IBM Z is built to redefine AI at scale, positioning enterprises to score 100% of their transactions in real-time. z17 enables businesses to drive innovation and do more, including the ability to process 50 percent more AI inference operations per day than z16.2 The new IBM z17 is built to drive business value across industries with a wide range of more than 250 AI use cases, such as mitigating loan risk, managing chatbot services, supporting medical image analysis or impeding retail crime, among others.
- Bringing AI to Data - z17 AI inferencing capabilities are powered by a second-generation on-chip AI accelerator built into the IBM Telum II processor, featuring increased frequency, compute capacity, a 40 percent growth in cache, enabling more than 450 billion inferencing operations in a day and one millisecond response time.
- Expanding Acceleration for AI - The IBM Spyre Accelerator expected to be available 4Q 2025 via PCIe card, will provide additional AI compute capabilities to complement the Telum II processor. Together, they will create optimized environments to support multi-model methods of AI. The Spyre Accelerator is specially engineered to bring generative AI capabilities to the mainframe including running assistants, leveraging enterprise data contained in the system.
- Leveraging AI to Enhance User Experience - z17 is designed to bolster the skills and efficiency of developers and IT operations with the use of AI assistants and AI agents, including IBM watsonx Code Assistant for Z and IBM watsonx Assistant for Z. In addition, for the first time, watsonx Assistant for Z will be integrated with Z Operations Unite to provide AI chat-based incident detection and resolution using live systems data.
"The industry is quickly learning that AI will only be as valuable as the infrastructure it runs on," said Ross Mauri, general manager of IBM Z and LinuxONE, IBM. "With z17, we're bringing AI to the core of the enterprise with the software, processing power, and storage to make AI operational quickly. Additionally, organizations can put their vast, untapped stores of enterprise data to work with AI in a secured, cost-effective way."Fully Integrated Across Hardware and Software
IBM z17 is a system designed from the ground up to fully integrate into hybrid environments by tightly joining hardware innovations, software capabilities for AI, and rich support for open-standards and tooling. This enables differentiated performance and reliability while reimagining how developers and systems operators engage with and manage IBM Z, including:
- Operating System for AI - IBM also previewed z/OS 3.2, the next version of its flagship operating system for IBM Z, planned to be released in the third quarter of 2025. z/OS 3.2 is designed to support hardware-accelerated AI capabilities across the system and operational AI insights for system management capabilities. Additionally, z/OS 3.2 will provide support for modern data access methods, NoSQL databases, and hybrid cloud data processing. These new capabilities will help AI software tap into a broader set of enterprise data and derive predictive business insights.
- Unified IT Operations - Also announced today was IBM Z Operations Unite, which brings together key performance metrics and logs from multiple sources across IBM Z, in OpenTelemetry format, to streamline IBM Z operations with AI. The new solution is designed to accelerate the time to detect anomalies, isolate the impact of potential incidents, and reduce the resolution time. Used in conjunction with IBM Concert, operations teams can benefit from intelligent correlation of operational data across the entire enterprise. IBM Operations Unite will be generally available in May 2025.
- AI Accelerator for Business Efficiency - With the expansion options for the IBM Spyre Accelerator expected to be available 4Q 2025 via PCIe card, IBM z17 aims to transform the user experience on the platform. Clients will be able to run IBM's growing catalog of assistants and agents, based on IBM's Granite models, natively on z17 without taking on the added risk associated with moving data or sensitive business logic off platform. Together, these solutions are engineered to form an optimized stack, to enable clients to drive more productivity with security and scale.
IBM z17 furthers the platform's history of strong security and resiliency capabilities. New developments in AI have enabled the deployment of added intelligence across this ever-growing area of importance for clients as new threats appear every day. This includes several new capabilities, including:
- Secrets Management - Capabilities from HashiCorp, an IBM Company, announced in March are now available on IBM Z to help standardize secrets management across hybrid cloud. IBM Vault uses identity-based security to authenticate and authorize access to secrets, certificates, keys, tokens and other sensitive data. With the addition of IBM Vault, clients can have a single solution to help protect critical workloads by managing the entire secrets lifecycle across their full IT estate.
- AI-powered Data Security - IBM intends to deliver new capabilities for discovering and classifying sensitive data on the platform. This would tap into Telum II and utilize natural language processing so mission-critical data can be identified and protected. Additionally, our latest AI-driven security solution, IBM Threat Detection for z/OS, is designed to detect and identify potentially malicious anomalies that might be the result of a cyber-attack.
IBM's tailored, comprehensive support experience helps IBM Z clients meet demands beyond traditional maintenance. Delivered by IBM Technology Lifecycle Services, IBM Support for z17 helps clients optimize their environments for peak performance to address risk and disruptions for mission-critical operations. IBM's AI processes streamline incident remediation and help improve case resolution time, built on IBM watsonx, now support IBM Z systems.
IBM Delivers Secured and Agile Storage
IBM Storage DS8000 plays a key role as an integrated storage solution for IBM Z. The latest generation of IBM Storage DS8000 (10th Generation) is designed to harness the full power of IBM z17, providing organizations access to critical workloads, consistent and optimized data performance, and a modular architecture to adopt the latest IBM research-backed technologies to fuel business growth while monetizing data. Together, IBM Z and IBM Storage offer a modern infrastructure delivering a secured and agile platform for mission-critical workloads.
Availability
IBM z17 will be generally available June 18, 2025 For more information, visit IBM.com/z17. The IBM Spyre Accelerator is expected to be available starting in Q4 2025.
17 Comments on IBM Announces z17, The First Mainframe Fully Engineered for the AI Age
Their mainframes run specialized operating systems like OS400 which are incompatible with windows, linux and unix binaries, making them hardened targets against common vulnerabilities.
Some companies have deals with IBM since 40 years ago or more, and even though switching to something else would be more profitable, the roots of IBM systems are sometimes so deep in companies that it's hard for them to switch to something else.
Also, few other mainframes providers can offer the same level of reliability. IBM business customer service is among the best i have ever known. Although it's as reliable as it is expensive of course.
LOL
Why? Mainframe's selling point is: being secure and reliable.
While sometimes being slower /clunkier.
Good luck selling it.....
Their hardware isn't about being on the top of some benchmark competition.
As some here have mentioned, IBM's customer base isn't your typical IT flunkie nursing some e-commerce or chatroom server. The mainframe customers are government, finance, military, etc. Tax agencies run mainframes and you should be happy about it because security is a top priority. Same with your bank, pension fund, etc.
IBM provides a lot of professional services mostly related to security and reliability. That's where they decided their core competencies should lie which is why they got out of the consumer PC business 21 years ago.
Remember that the "B" in IBM stands for Business.
Linux is an officially supported OS for z17 with RedHat, Suse and Ubuntu distributions. Not only on LPARs (hardware partitioning) and z/VM (IBM hypervisor), but also as KVM (virtualization) hosts themselves. There's nothing stopping you from running a 1980s COBOL system on the same mainframe together with a modern Kubernetes cluster, and it's being done routinely in production.
Mainframes are still used because their processing paradigm is different from "normal" PC hardware. They are transaction-focused with guaranteed bandwidth and latency characteristics due to dedicated IO hardware.
There's multiple levels of redundancies as well. Hardware can be partitioned... in hardware, as opposed to what x86 or ARM "virtualization extensions" attempt to provide.
For certain use cases there aren't more performant or reliable systems available. This comes at a cost of being reliant on a single supplier who will charge you for everything, but for some that's worth it ;)
There have been numerous attempts to replicate and replace mainframes with commodity hardware, but there's always something lacking. Legacy compatibility is also a problem with efforts like that.
All software engineers make decisions how to prioritize features. IBM has put security and reliability at the top of OS400 and has done so for decades in predecessor OSes. It's not the OS400 is secure because it's obscure. It's largely because it was designed for security, something that Microsoft cannot claim.
In a similar way, Apple has architected their systems (hardware, software, services, policies) for more security and privacy. It's not like iOS is an obscure operating system.
It's more like if 95% of people had houses made of bricks, while another company made special houses made of metal. Most thieves would have knowledge and tools to break brick walls, making it harder for most of them to break metal walls.
While it increases security this way, it's also a big downside when actually using the system, because you loose a lot of time to learn how it works from the ground up while you can be immediately productive with more common OSes.
Don't compare mainframes with personal computers or smartphones in 2025. And don't compare OS400 with Microsoft Windows 11 or Mint Linux or macOS or Steam Deck OS. You don't run Google Chrome on mainframes.
Your argument is still flawed, even when using another word, since security by uniqueness is no security still. And again, this isn't why mainframe OS' are secure which was the second sentence in my post.
I just gave you a simple example that shows why security by uniqueness is a kind of security, so you can't say it's no security at all. It's not flawless of course, so you can't rely on only this feature to implement your security strategy, but it's one of the possible available cards.
PS: it might also seems like i'm defending the ibm uniqueness security approach, but actually i don't think that's a good strategy. The cost regarding to productivity is too high in my humble opinion. If i had to choose between IBM unique OSes and linux for a mainframe, i would pick linux anytime. But i've seen the IBM OSes at work and i understand why it could be a reassuring choice for some IT directors.
The video itself is here:
www.ibm.com/z/telum