IBM's Z9 Mainframe Doubles Performance

The ninth generation of IBM's venerable mainframe was announced today. It sports a doubling of memory and overall performance.

IBM is suggesting to customers that the way to harness the increased power of the Z9 is to apply it to security; specifically, by encrypting data at all stages of storage and manipulation. While encryption, even with the Z9's hardware assists, is very compute-intensive, the benefits are legion against internal prying and theft. Various financial services and health care applications under strict privacy regulation in the U.S. and Europe, leaving data sitting around memory is increasing considered a poor plan prone to disaster and internal theft.

Worth noting, IBM is not alone in a strategy that uses some of the ever-increasing computer power to protect data security. I expect Intel will get to market next year with its Lagrande Technology. LT will do for PCs what IBM's Z9 is doing for mainframe data: encrypt data from keyboards and disks, and to monitors, while creating hardware-protected regions for processing "trusted" applications. Only the application will get to see the data in its actual form. The rest of the computer will just see a bunch of random, encrypted bits.

A tip of the hat to IBM and the Z9. But see how quickly the mass-market will catch up with this important security technology.