When e-business exploded in the late 1990s, it created a disconnect between the capabilities of existing data center technologies and the internet aspirations of countless companies around the world. Suddenly, sales channels were always open, relentlessly demanding, global and dynamic — and the technology of the day couldn’t keep up. In 2000, IBM unveiled the eServer zSeries 900, built with e-business as its primary function, to close that gap.
The Z series (Z stands for “zero downtime”) introduced several breakthroughs that continue to be employed today. For the first time, it enabled thousands of servers collaborating within a single physical rack — or frame — to handle unpredictable traffic spikes, which had become an especially thorny challenge. And it introduced a set of components to enable so-called hot failovers, whereby traffic could be redirected to standby computers to ensure continuous operations.
The 64-bit zOS, which remains in use, featured world-class security and was backward-compatible with the IBM System/360 and System/370, which had been introduced decades earlier. Additionally, IBM introduced a novel pricing arrangement based on actual demand rather than total capacity.
The zSeries 900 was an immediate hit, especially in the financial sector, where data security is paramount and even a minute of downtime can cause USD 1 million in losses. It also kicked off a long line of increasingly more advanced systems that have evolved to support open-source platforms, cloud computing and AI. More than two-thirds of the Fortune 100 continue to use the IBM zSystems family to manage mission-critical operations and to protect their most sensitive data.