The Big Blue today announced the System z10 mainframe, that aims to increase data center efficiency and improve performance by 100 percent and to decrease cooling costs and floor space requirements.

IBM, who spent five years and $1.5 billion to develop, said that as single z10 is the equivalent of nearly 1,500 distributed servers based on the popular x86 design, with up to an 85 percent smaller footprint, and 85 percent lower energy costs. Also, it is 50 percent faster, it delivers up to 100 percent better performance for CPU-intensive jobs, and it provides 70 percent more capacity than its z9 predecessor.

"We believe System z10 is the most sophisticated piece of information technology ever built for any purpose. But to our clients, the value is simple," said Jim Stallings, General Manager, Enterprise Systems, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "This single system is capable of consolidating the work of up to thousands of servers -- sweeping the floor of the data center and reducing energy consumption, required floor space and the slew of costs associated with distributed server environments."

The mainframe uses 64 processors with Quad-Core technology and supports a broad range of workloads, including Linux, XML, Java, WebSphere and key Service Oriented Architecture-related workloads. In addition, IBM is working with Sun Microsystems and Sine Nomine Associates to pilot the Open Solaris operating system on System z, demonstrating the openness and flexibility of the mainframe. The price of a System z10 starts at $1 million.

Despite the competition with Sun, HP and Dell, IBM remains the  dominant mainframe maker, winning about 80 percent of sales in the past two years, according to Gartner.

The company expects to see “the real benefit” to its revenue from the new mainframes in the second quarter, with the current quarter “a period of product transition,” Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge said on a conference call with analysts in January