Bridgestone buys top-end IBM servers

Bridgestone, the largest tire manufacturer, has purchased from IBM three top-end z900 mainframes and 23 eight-processor x440 Intel servers running Windows. Bridgestone also is using IBM's DB2 database software.

The z900 machines, which often cost more than $1 million and lead to annual support revenue for IBM, are linked into a "Sysplex" configuration that effectively unites them into a single server, IBM said. Mainframes once had been given up for dead, but IBM has experienced resurgent sales of the systems, which are better able at doing multiple jobs at once and withstanding hardware and software problems than most other machines.