At LinuxCon North America in Seattle, IBM announced it is introducing two Linux mainframe servers – called LinuxONE – that are the industry’s most powerful and secure enterprise servers designed for the new application economy and hybrid cloud era.
The LinuxONE portfolio of hardware, software and services solutions provides two distinct Linux systems for large enterprises and mid-size businesses. LinuxONE Emperor, based on the IBM z13, is the world’s most advanced Linux system with the fastest processor in the industry. LinuxONE Rockhopper, an entry into the portfolio, is designed for clients and emerging markets seeking the speed, security and availability of the mainframe but in a smaller package.
Significantly broadening options for enterprises, IBM has enabled key open source and industry software for LinuxONE and IBM z Systems, including Apache Spark, Docker, Node.js, MongoDB, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Chef. These technologies work seamlessly on the mainframe just as they do with other platforms, requiring no special skills and with compelling performance advantages. Moreover, Canonical and IBM plan to create an Ubuntu distribution for LinuxONE and z Systems, making the capabilities of the mainframe accessible to Ubuntu’s strong community of developers.
IBM is also offering more choices for virtualization on the mainframe by enabling the new LinuxONE systems to be provisioned as a virtual machine through the open standards-based KVM hypervisor. SUSE, a leading distributor of Linux, will provide initial support for KVM for the mainframe.
In addition, IBM is contributing the single largest amount of mainframe code to open source community. The code includes technology from IBM’s mainframe to help enterprises identify issues and help prevent failures before they happen, help improve performance across platforms, and enable better integration with the broader network and cloud.
The contribution of mainframe code and introduction of the LinuxONE portfolio coincide with the 15th anniversary of Linux on the mainframe. "Fifteen years ago IBM surprised the industry by putting Linux on the mainframe, and today more than a third of IBM mainframe clients are running Linux,” said Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President, IBM Systems. “We are deepening our commitment to the open community by combining the best of the open world with most advanced system in the world in order to help clients embrace new mobile and hybrid cloud workloads. Building on the success of Linux on the mainframe, we continue to push the limits beyond the capabilities of commodity servers that are not designed for security and performance at extreme scale."
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