IBM announced a launch of seven new solution packages to help customers who use its System z mainframes ease new workload deployment. The new series of solutions is designed to lower cost of new workload deployment on System z, bringing it more in line with the cost of workload deployment on competing systems, IBM said in a statement.

The new System z Solution Edition Series is comprised of integrated hardware, software and service packages, focused on disaster recovery, data warehousing, security, service oriented architecture, electronic payments and application development.

"The Solution Edition Series, part of the Mainframe Charter, which IBM first articulated in 2003 delivers innovative solutions, expands System z's performance and value, and fosters a larger System z community to meet customers' business requirements," Karl Freund, IBM's marketing and strategy VP for System z, said in a statement.

The new offerings include IBM System z hardware, IBM middleware and maintenance programs for the following business functions:

• Data warehousing: With the System z Solution Edition for Data Warehousing, customers can deploy new business intelligence applications on System z while helping to avoid the lengthy delays which can be common to acquiring and integrating distributed servers.
• Application development: The System z Solutions Edition for Application Development can help make mainframe deployment of new workloads affordable, simple and accessible to application developers while at the same time facilitating a development environment that is consistent with distributed platforms.
• Disaster recovery: The System z Solutions Edition for GDPS (Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex) offers attractive prices on a range of some of the most popular continuous availability and disaster recovery configurations.
• Security: The System z Solution Edition for Enterprise Security can help customers to minimize online security threats for business compliance, centralized enterprise identity and access management, encryption and key management, and fraud analysis.
• Electronic payments: The System z Solution Edition for ACI offers benefits to help customers that run applications from ACI Worldwide, an international provider of software for electronic payment systems. ACI's strategic retail and fraud payments applications are optimized for System z.
• SOA: The System z Solution Edition for WebSphere combines System z technology with IBM's industry-leading WebSphere Application Server for a foundation to build, reuse, run, integrate and manage Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications and services.