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."
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