IBM has announced the IBM Z17, the next generation of the company’s iconic Mainframe, completely designed with AI capabilities for hardware, software and systems operations. Promoted by the new IBM Telum II processor, IBM Z17 expands the capacities of the system beyond the transactional AI to allow new workloads.

IBM Z is built to redefine AI on a scale, positioning companies to analyze all their transactions in real time. With the new Z17, organizations can be more innovative and go further, being able to process 50% more inference operations to the day than with the predecessor model, Z16. The new IBM Z17 is able to boost business value in all sectors with more than 250 cases of AI use, which cover from the reduction of credit risk and the management of chatbots, to the support of medical images, the analysis or prevention of crimes in retail, among others.

IBM Z17 is the result of 5 years of design and development that has included the presentation of more than 300 patent applications before the US patents and brands. This new mainframe introduces multimodal AI capacities, new security functions for the protection of data and tools that take advantage of AI to improve the usability and management of the system, including:

  • Bring AI closer to data: The inference capabilities of the Z17 are achieved thanks to a second generation chip that accelerates the abilities of AI. This is integrated into the IBM Telum II processor, which offers greater frequency, computing capacity and a 40% increase in cache, allowing more than 450,000 million inference operations to be carried out in one day, with response times of a millisecond.
  • Expand the acceleration of AI: IBM Spyre Accelerator, which is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2025 through PCIE cards, provides additional AI computing capabilities that act as a complement to the Telum II processor. Together, these two components will be able to create optimized environments that support multimodal ia methods. Spyre Accelerator is specially designed to provide generative capabilities to the mainframe, including the execution of assistants safely, taking advantage of the business data contained in the system.
  • Improve user experience with AI: Z17 is designed to reinforce the skills and efficiency of developers and IT operations through the use of AI and AI agents, including IBM Watson Code Assistant for Z and IBM Watson Assistant for Z. In addition, for the first time, Watson Assistant for Z will be integrated with Z operations unite to offer detection and resolution of incident Chat with AI, using real -time data of the system.

“The industry is quickly learning that AI will only be as valuable as the infrastructure in which it is executed,” said Ross Mauri, general director of IBM Z and Linuxone of IBM. «With Z17, we are leading AI to the company’s core with software, processing power and storage capacity to activate it quickly and efficiently. It also allows companies to activate large volumes of business data that until now remained underutilized, safely and profitable.

Fully integrated through hardware and software

IBM Z17 is a system designed from scratch to integrate completely into hybrid environments thanks to the combination of hardware innovations, software capabilities for AI and broad support for open standards and tools. This architecture offers differentiating performance and reliability, while redefine and transforms the way developers and operators manage and interact with IBM Z. This includes:

  • Operating system for AI: IBM has also presented an advance of Z/OS 3.2, the following version of the Operating System for IBM Z, whose launch is planned for the third quarter of 2025. Z/OS 3.2 is designed to make the most of the capacities of the accelerated by hardware throughout the system, as well as to offer operational information based on AI that improves its management. In addition, Z/OS 3.2 will be compatible with modern data access methods, NOSQL databases and data processing in the hybrid cloud. These new capabilities will help AI software to access an even broader set of business data and obtain predictive business information.
  • Unified IT Operations: IBM Z operations unite has also been announced today, a solution that brings together operational data from multiple sources in IBM Z, in OpenTelemetry format, to optimize IT operations with AI. This new tool is designed to accelerate the anomalies detection time, isolate the impact of possible incidents and reduce error resolution time. Used together with IBM Concert, operating equipment can benefit from the intelligent correlation of operational data throughout the company. IBM Operations Unite will be available in May 2025.
  • AI accelerator for business efficiency: With the expansion options provided by IBM Spyre Accelerator, which is expected to be available in the last quarter of 2025 through a PCIE card, IBM Z17 aims to transform the user’s experience into the platform. Customers will be able to use the wide catalog of IBM attendees and agents, based on IBM Granite models, native to Z17 without assuming the added risk of moving data or sensitive business logic outside the platform. Together, these solutions are designed to form an optimized battery that allows customers to increase productivity safely already scale.

Designed for Resilience: Security and Cyberdefensa in the Center

IBM Z17 reinforces its historical safety and resilience capabilities, characteristics of the platform. Advances in AI have allowed the deployment of additional intelligence in this area increasingly important for customers in the face of the constant appearance of new threats. Among the new capabilities are:

  • Secret management: The functionalities announced in March offered by Hashicorp, IBM company, are already available in IBM Z to help standardize the management of secrets in the hybrid cloud. IBM Vault uses security based on identities to authenticate and authorize access to secrets, certificates, keys, tokens and other confidential data. With the incorporation of IBM Vault, customers can have a single solution to help protect critical workloads managing the entire life cycle of secrets throughout their IT ecosystem.
  • IA -based data security: IBM is developing new functions to discover and classify confidential data on the platform. This would take advantage of Telum II and use natural language processing to identify and protect critical mission data. In addition, our last safety solution based on AI, IBM Threat Detection for Z/OS, is designed to detect and identify potentially malicious anomalies that could be the result of a cyber attack.

IBM expands the enabled support for ibm z17

The IBM comprehensive and personalized support model helps IBM Z to face demands that go beyond traditional maintenance. Through IBM Technology Lifecle Services, IBM Support for Z17 helps customers optimize their environments to obtain maximum performance, and deal with the risks and interruptions in critical mission operations. IBM’s processes, based on the Watsonx platform, expedite the resolution of incidents and improve the response times in case management. These capacities are now available for IBM Z systems.