IBM Sets June Date for AI Agent Era z17 Mainframes

'The industry is quickly learning that AI will only be as valuable as the infrastructure it runs on,' says Ross Mauri, IBM Z and LinuxOne GM.

IBM will make its new z17 mainframes available June 18, with its Spyre accelerator set for availability in the fourth quarter and a new IBM Z Operations Unite offer for detecting anomalies and reducing resolution times slated for May 30 general availability–not to mention new innovations from recent acquisition HashiCorp.

The Armonk, N.Y.-based vendor also revealed Tuesday that its z/OS 3.2 flagship Z operating system is expected to launch in 2025’s third quarter. Also becoming GA on May 9 is the IBM COBOL Upgrade Advisor for z/OS, which has the goal of getting businesses to the latest version of the programming language for z/OS 6 with a modern VS Code interface for improved analysis and reporting.

IBM positions the z17 as a mainframe for the artificial intelligence era with AI across hardware, software and systems operations, according to a statement Tuesday. z17 brings the ability to use AI assistants and AI agents to developers and IT operations.

“The industry is quickly learning that AI will only be as valuable as the infrastructure it runs on,” Ross Mauri, IBM Z and LinuxOne general manager, said in the statement. “With z17, we're bringing AI to the core of the enterprise with the software, processing power, and storage to make AI operational quickly. Additionally, organizations can put their vast, untapped stores of enterprise data to work with AI in a secured, cost-effective way.”

IBM z17 Release

CRN has reached out to IBM for comment. In 2025, IBM is working to add more qualified partners, increase the overall percentage of company revenue that comes through the channel and improve partner technical skills, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.

Tim Kreytak, CEO of Lexington, Mass.-based IBM partner Ironside, told CRN in a recent interview that his IBM customers continue to experiment with the vendor’s AI offers and seek services around improving data for AI use.

“I definitely think that 2023 was the year of the (AI) experiment,” Kreytak said. “2024 was the year of the PoC (proof of concept). And we are hoping 2025 is the year of the production application.”

The z17 is powered by IBM’s Telum II processor and can enable users to score all real-time transactions even in high-volume production environments, according to the vendor. Telum II has improved frequency, compute capacity and a 40 percent growth in cache. It enables more than 450 billion inferencing operations in a day and 1 millisecond response time.

Telum II will also allow for natural language processing for identifying and protecting mission-critical data.

z17 can process 50 percent more AI inference operations per day compared to the z16. And z17’s 250-plus AI use cases include mitigating loan risk, managing chatbot services, medical image analysis support and addressing retail crime.

z17 was designed with input from more than 100 IBM clients, according to the vendor. The mainframe has multi-modal AI capabilities, new data protection security features and AI-powered system usability and management tools.

The new mainframe offer also seeks to enable developers to use IBM Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, Watsonx Assistant for Z and other AI assistants and agents, according to IBM. Watsonx Assistant for Z will integrate with Z Operations Unite for chat-based incident detection and resolutiuon with live systems data.

The Spyre accelerator coming toward the end of 2025 will be available through Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) card, according to IBM.

Spyre will allow for more AI compute capabilities and complement the Telum II to support multi-model AI methods. Spyre is designed for running assistants and other AI uses cases that leverage enterprise data in the mainframe system. Spyre will also allow native running of IBM Granite-based assistants and agents without taking the risk of moving data and sensitive business logic off platform, according to the vendor.

The upcoming z/OS 3.2 operating system is meant to support hardware-accelerated AI capabilities across the system. The OS also offers operational AI insights for system management, modern data access methods support, hybrid cloud data processing and more, according to IBM.

The upcoming Z Operations Unite offer aims to unify performance metrics and logs from multiple Z sources in OpenTelemetry format to better allow AI on operations. Users can leverage Operations Unite with IBM Concert for better operational data correlation enterprisewide, according to IBM.

As for HashiCorp, which IBM bought for $6.4 billion in February, Z users have access to the vendor’s secrets management capabilities across hybrid cloud.

The mainframe news comes just after IBM revealed that it is boosting the Snowflake capabilities of IBM Consulting–No. 6 on CRN’s 2024 Solution Provider 500–through the acquisition of New York-based Hakkoda.