IBM announced the System z10 mainframe, which will dramatically increase data center efficiency and improve performance by 100 percent while reducing power, cooling costs and floor space requirements.

A single System z10 is the equivalent of nearly 1,500 distributed servers, with up to an 85 percent smaller footprint, and 85 percent lower energy costs. It can consolidate x86 software licenses at up to a 30-to-1 ratio.

The new z10 is designed to be 50 percent faster, delivers up to 100 percent better performance for CPU-intensive jobs, and provides 70 percent more capacity than its z9 predecessor.

Designed to Manage IT as a Service and Drive the New Enterprise Data Center

- Designed to help businesses reduce inefficiency and complexity of today's data centers, but also share IT resources more efficiently and better align them to specific business objectives and business conditions.

- Allows a business to more easily log, track, audit and chargeback every transaction, moving beyond basic virtualization (server partitioning) to a true IT infrastructure -- including business applications, such as security, storage, processing power -- that is provisioned on demand.

- The end result is a business that manages IT as a service -- using a policy-driven system that doles out, manages and tracks appropriate resources where and when.

The new System z10 is the only server to provide a complete range of policy-driven functions, including authorization management, utilization management, just-in-time capacity and virtualization security.