IBM, the dominant in the mainframe market, just unveiled the technological pinnacle of its 48 years of experience in enterprise computing – the new z Enterprise EC12, powered by the world’s most powerful microprocessor.

zNext, the 5.5 GHz CPU that we’ve learned about less than a week ago, is the heart of the new system twhichpacks 25 percent more performance and 50 percent more capacity  than its predecessor.

“The new enterprise system, unveiled on Aug. 28, features technologies that demonstrate IBM’s ongoing commitment to meet the growing need to secure and manage critical information with the System z mainframe, David Balog, IBM’s general manager for System z, told eWEEK.

The EC12 is the result of a massive $1 billion investment, and the combined engineering muscle of 18 IBM research centers and several of the vendor’s top clients. In addition to the improved specs, the zEC12 features new capabilities that enable enterprises to not process their data faster, but also protect it much better.

Big Blue says that analytic workload performance is 30 percent higher than the previous generation z System. The IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator is pre-installed on the mainframe, and is joined by a tool called IBM zAware that analyzes system performance and detects problems whenever they appear.

In addition, the offering also comes with new SSD technology called Flash Express that’s designed to handle massive activity spikes such as market openings.

As far as security goes, the zEC12 packs Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 5+ security classification.  It also includes something called Crypto Express4S, a component that goes by the technical name of ‘tamper-resistant cryptographic co-processor ‘ and ensures that sensitive data and transactions are kept private. To top it all off, the system can be configured to accommodate different industries’ specific authentication requirements courtesy of hardware and software from IBM Research.