IBM plans to sell a lower-cost version of its z9 mainframe computer aimed at midsize businesses and emerging markets such as China.The System z9 Business Class mainframe will be priced from about $100,000, IBM said. A shipping date wasn't immediately available. IBM's existing mainframes, aimed at big corporations and government users, are priced from around $250,000 up to several million dollars.

The company has also opened a lab in Shanghai which will develop software for its System z mainframes, it said.

IBM argued that its pint-size mainframe will offer better utilization rates, as well as better security and reliability. The new system will compete with Unix servers and with powerful clusters built by tying together standard, x86-based servers.

The System z9 Business Class and its larger sibling, the System z9 Enterprise Class (EC) will be the first to offer the System z9 Integrated Information Processor (zIIP), a specialty engine that runs eligible database workloads. Shipping this quarter, zIIP is designed to help free-up general computing capacity and can help lower software costs for select workloads such as business intelligence (BI), ERP and CRM on the mainframe. IBM will not impose software charges on zIIP capacity. The zIIP effectively better enables data to be centralized on the mainframe.

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Prashanth Rai