When I walked into the media briefing room, photographers were jocking for the best position to capture the thumbs up pose of David Anderson. At first glance, I thought he was simply flashing a new IBM hand signal.

As I fixed my stare at his thumb, I saw the System z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP).

Anderson, eServer executive and briefing center team leader at IBM WW, is a professional engineer who has worked on every mainframe from the 3081 in 1981 to the System z9 and z890 which are the most popular Mainframes to date. He is an expert in how Systems fit into the On Demand Operating Environment to include IBM’s Virtualization Engine and Service Oriented Architecture.

To top it, his career has included managing I/O chip design for the zSeries, planning Mainframe products for small and mediumsize customers and managing IBM Poughkeepsie’s Cost Engineering department.

At this March 9 Philippine media roundtable, the IBM executive announced the company’s delivery of a breakthrough IBM mainframe specialty engine that will reinforce the System z9 as a trusted data platform.

The z9 runs five operating systems: z/OS, z/VM, z/TPF, z/VSE and Linux. It contains the industry’s leading security features including advanced encryption and up to 6,000 sin socket layer (SSL) handshakes per second.

He explained that the zIIP is a specialty engine that will run eligible database workloads and is designed to help free-up general computing capacity and lower software costs for select workloads such as business intelligence (BI), enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relation management (CRM) on the mainframe.

It will be a high-speed engine that better anables data to be centralized on the mainframe machine. The ease and economy of this solution helps break down the walls between transactional datastores on the mainframe and BI, ERP and CRM applications that run on distributed computers.

Furthermore, with the zIIP capability, the System z9 mainframe helps minimize the need to maintain duplicate copies of the data and provide better security between the applications and data.

"If your data is very precious for your business, the mainframe is a very important factor," Anderson remarked. In the case of the z Series, he added, "the value is in the recovery of data during disasters."

In an IBM press release, Jim Stallings, general manager, IBM System Z, stated, "Data is at the core of today’s most critical business issues, and the IBM System z9 mainframe equipped with a zIIP engine can expertly orchestrate information resources."

He added, "When users centralize their data on the mainframe, they may decrease the risks associated with having multiple copies of data across diverse systems. Audit, compliance, control and business recovery may be easier to manage when there is a single copy of the data. The main with zIIP engine can increasingly play an essential role as a security-rich enterprise data hub."