en.Wedoany.com Reported - IBM recently announced the expansion of its flagship product line, introducing new configurations for the IBM z17 and IBM LinuxONE 5 systems. This marks the first time the company has simultaneously offered both rack-mount and single-frame systems across the entire Z and LinuxONE product portfolio. Designed to the same performance, security, and ecosystem standards as the flagship models, these new configurations aim to provide enterprises with more deployment options, enabling them to flexibly adjust their infrastructure layout based on business needs.
Currently, organizations handling large-scale, highly sensitive workloads are facing severe data center cost pressures. According to CBRE's "2026 Global Data Center Trends Report," data center vacancy rates have hit historic lows, with rents exceeding $400 per kilowatt per month. IBM stated that its newly launched rack-mount and single-frame systems help enterprises optimize data center floor space while maintaining the high resilience required for core applications, providing a hardware solution to address these challenges.
In terms of specific performance, the new IBM z17 and IBM LinuxONE 5 configurations support up to 82 cores and 18 TB of memory, distributed across two processor drawers. Compared to the previous generation, core count has increased by approximately 20%, and memory capacity by 12%. Among these, the single-processor configuration of the IBM z17 ME2 runs full-speed IBM z/OS, delivering approximately 10% higher throughput per core compared to the IBM z16 A02 (the exact improvement depends on workload and system configuration).
Tom McPherson, General Manager of IBM Z and LinuxONE, noted that the number of mission-critical workloads is growing at an astonishing rate, forcing organizations to make difficult trade-offs between performance, AI integration, and infrastructure footprint. He stated that by introducing these new systems, IBM is opening up these technologies to a broader user base, allowing workloads to run in more suitable locations. Dr. Owain Kenway, Head of ARC R&D (Platform Technologies) at University College London, added that his organization requires the highest levels of performance, efficiency, resilience, and security to handle sensitive datasets, and the new LinuxONE 5 single-frame, rack-mount, and Express models deliver these advanced technologies at a cost-effective price.
