The Met Office will benefit from faster data processing thanks to a mainframe upgrade, delivered by Computacenter.
The IT provider successfully tendered for the job, which will enable the Met office to process more weather data much faster than was previously possible.
"Every day, our weather and climate forecasts help people make better decisions," said Richard Bevan, head of IT infrastructure and operations at the Met Office.
"We help organisations save lives, reduce costs, meet schedules and encourage growth. We want to transform weather intelligence into a tool that drives greater business performance in today's digital world and the mainframe is at the heart of that."
The environment is comprised of two mainframes with 44 cores and 200 terabytes of attached storage to ensure it can handle the amount of power needed to process such high volumes of data. The upgrade will enable it to perform more than 23,000 trillion calculations per second, the Met Office explained.
Two IBM z13 LinuxOne mainframes and IBM hybrid storage systems are in situ, with plans to add IBM Wave for virtual server management in the future.
The Met Office explained it worked closely with Computacenter from the beginning, building the solution together to ensure delivered what the organisation needs to help it improve the accuracy of forecasts.
"Computacenter is an important IT partner for the Met Office. [It] understands our unique requirements and has a strong relationship with IBM," added Martyn Hunt, technical lead for the Met Office's mainframe team.
"Any issues with performance can have a direct impact on the availability of the services we provide. Without accurate and timely weather information, everything from commercial flight schedules to emergency rescue operations can be disrupted."
-
Pure Storage’s expanded partner ecosystem helps fuel Q3 growthNews The data storage vendor has announced a 16% year-over-year revenue hike in its latest earnings report, driven by continued channel and product investment
-
Partners have been ‘critical from day one’ at AWS, and the company’s agentic AI drive means they’re more important than everNews The hyperscaler is leaning on its extensive ties with channel partners and systems integrators to drive AI adoption
-
Future focus 2025: Technologies, trends, and transformationWhitepaper Actionable insight for IT decision-makers to drive business success today and tomorrow
-
Put AI to work for IT operationswhitepaper Reduce the cost and complexity of managing hybrid applications
-
AI in the retail industry is spreading beyond the IT departmentNews AI has become a strategic imperative for retailers, delivering marked productivity gains
-
Maximizing contact center operations with generative AI assistants backed by responsible AI principleswhitepaper Reduce the cost and complexity of managing hybrid applications
-
IBM just launched powerful new open source AI models – here’s what you need to knowNews Available under the Apache 2.0 license, IBM's Granite 3.0 models are trained on enterprise data and can out-perform the competition
-
Achieving business outcomes with generative AIWebinar Take your hybrid cloud journey to the next level with generative AI
-
Wimbledon’s new Catch Me Up AI feature promises to keep fans up to date at the tournament – after it irons out some of the wrinklesNews The latest feature to come out of IBM’s partnership with Wimbledon will keep fans engaged from the early stages right through to the final with dynamic player insights
-
AI demands new ways of data managementwhitepaper The data leader’s guide for how to leverage the right databases for applications, analytics and generative AI
