IBM launches z15, designed for hybrid multicloud security and cloud-native app development

IBM announced z15, a new enterprise platform delivering the ability to manage the privacy of customer data across hybrid multicloud environments. With z15, clients can manage who gets access to data via policy-based controls, with an industry-first capability to instantly revoke access to data across the hybrid cloud.

The movement of data between partners and third parties is often the root cause of data breaches. In fact, 60 percent of businesses reported they suffered a data breach caused by a vendor or third party in 2018 . With the growing adoption of hybrid multicloud environments, the challenge of maintaining data security and privacy only grows more acute and challenging.

z15 culminates four years of development across IBM – with over 3,000 IBM Z patents issued or in-process, and represents a collaboration with input from over 100 companies. Key z15 innovations from these investments include:

• Encryption everywhere – Building upon pervasive encryption, IBM unveiled new Data Privacy Passports technology that clients can use to gain control over how data is stored and shared – enabling the ability to protect and provision data and revoke access to that data at any time, not only within z15 environment but across an enterprise’s hybrid multicloud environment. z15 also can encrypt data everywhere – across hybrid multicloud environments – to help enterprises secure their data wherever it travels.
• Cloud-native development – Gives clients a competitive advantage by evolving how they modernize apps in place, build new cloud-native apps and securely integrate their most important workloads across clouds.
• Instant recovery – An industry-first approach to limiting the cost and impact of planned and unplanned downtime, enabling users to access full system capacity to accelerate shutdown and restart of IBM Z services and provide a temporary capacity boost to rapidly recover from lost time.

Rising importance of data privacy in doing business

With z15, pervasive encryption is extended across the enterprise enforcing data privacy by policy even when it leaves the IBM Z platform, without impact to system performance. With this industry-first capability, clients can offer new services and features that give their consumers stronger control over how their personal data is used.

The next phase of digital transformation: Moving mission-critical work to the cloud

Businesses today have already completed the first 20 percent of their cloud journey. z15 is uniquely positioned to help companies take this next step in their digital transformation efforts to move mission critical workloads (the other 80%) to the cloud by delivering a hyper-secure, agile and continuously available platform.

As the center of a secured hybrid cloud strategy, z15 can process up to 1 trillion web transactions a day, support massive databases, and scale-out to 2.4 million Docker containers in a single z15 system— up to 2.3x more Docker containers per core on a z15 LPAR versus a compared bare-metal x86 platform, running an identical web server load.

Z15 also helps clients address mission critical latency challenges by delivering up to 30x lower latency and up to 28x less CPU utilization on z15 by compressing secure web transaction data before encryption using the Integrated Accelerator for z Enterprise Data Compression instead of using software compression.

Data-centric privacy controls

Data Privacy Passports is a consolidated data privacy solution that extends clients’ ability to deliver privacy by not only protecting data on-premises at the infrastructure level, but allows clients to provision data rules to manage individual user access across private, public and hybrid clouds at the data level. z15 accomplishes this by delivering:

• Protection for data wherever it goes. Protecting data today is a challenge for the simple reason that data does not stay in one place and solutions are often fragmented or siloed. Data Privacy Passports addresses this challenge by introducing Trusted Data Objects (TDO) which provide data centric protection that can move with the data.
• Privacy with controlled data usage. Data Privacy Passports allows an organization to establish and enforce an enterprise-wide data privacy policy where different views of data are surfaced to different users based on their need to know. Trusted Data Object technology can also be used to prevent collusion between data owners leading to the misuse of data.
• Provable consumption of data. Track the complete data transformation journey from point of origin to point of consumption, with a central point of auditing and compliance for all data access and aggregation.
• Embedded Key Management: Data Privacy Passports provides all required key management for Trusted Data Objects that are created and distributed throughout the enterprise. This greatly reduces the complexity of implementing the solutions and provides simple management of data as it moves between systems.

Bringing cloud-native app development to IBM Z

Last month, IBM announced intent to deliver Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE. This offering will accelerate the transformation to greater portability and agility through integrated tooling and a feature-rich ecosystem for cloud-native development on Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE offerings.

Coupled with Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks, z15 is the world’s most powerful system for secure hybrid cloud workloads. Cloud developers can deploy z/OS applications on OpenShift with no special z/OS skills required.

IBM also intends to deliver IBM Cloud Pak offerings to Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE offerings. These offerings will accelerate the rich IBM software ecosystem that is necessary for enterprise clients to adopt hybrid multicloud deployment.

These offerings, combined with the IBM premier enterprise platforms, IBM Z and LinuxONE, will reinforce and further strengthen IBM’s capability to unlock business value and drive growth for clients by providing a secure and open hybrid multicloud platform.

Mission-critical work done with no time lost

For both planned and unplanned downtime, Instant Recovery brings clients the ability to unlock the full power of z15, spinning up built-in cores to return their system back to business, while uniquely catching up on business transactions 2.5x faster than previously possible. This allows you to:

• Accelerate time to value. By unleashing the potential of extra capacity within the system you can shorten downtime and rapidly restore services and utilize that extra capacity to rapidly process delayed transactions. The IBM z15 has 12% more cores than z14, and 25% more memory than z14 to help meet the needs of today’s digital businesses.
• Gain unlimited usage. By enabling you to utilize Instant Recovery as frequently as your business demands you have far greater flexibility to respond to new demands and ongoing maintenance requirements.
• Have zero impact on cost. You can exploit this industry first approach to limiting the cost and impact of downtime at zero cost to the business for IBM software.

IBM Z and storage at the center of a secured hybrid cloud

In May, IBM announced key capabilities to further position IBM Z it as a center point of a secured hybrid cloud strategy including z/OS Container Extensions and z/OS Cloud Broker, making it easier for developers to build and manage applications – both available on z15.

Clients will also be able to take advantage of Tailored Fit Pricing for IBM Z, a simple cloud pricing model for today’s enterprise IT environment designed to deliver the transparency, and flexibility of consumption-based pricing, with economies of scale for workloads on IBM z/OS.

In addition to z15, IBM today announced a new high-end, enterprise storage system, the IBM DS8900F specifically designed for mission critical hybrid multicloud environments. The next generation of IBM DS8900F storage system delivers comprehensive next-level cyber security, data availability and system resiliency for clients.

The IBM DS8900F offers clients more than 99.99999% uptime, several Disaster Recovery options with near-zero recovery times, to ensure protection of data and the fastest application response time in the market.

With these new enterprise-class storage services IBM Z clients now have a new level of control to store their data where it makes the best economic and business sense, while always keeping it resilient, available, and at the highest performance in the industry.