In fact, Canonical will create a new Ubuntu distribution that will run on the LinuxONE and z Systems, and IBM will contribute back to the community with the single largest amount of mainframe code.
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Two servers are being issued, both named for Penguins. The system can scale up to 8,000 virtual machines or hundreds of thousands of containers. The new mainframes are built around 5.6 GHz Power8 superscaler processors along with an expanded memory pool that includes four levels of cache. These developments have had a ripple effect on all types of enterprise software and hardware, including the mainframe. Both have encryption locked down in the hardware and software, including Protected-key, which offers extra protection with a 28x performance improvement over regular secure-key technology.
Finally, IBM said that its LinuxONE systems now support Apache Spark, Node.js, MongoDB, MariaDB, PostgresSQL, Chef and Docker. The company said it will soon release mainframe code to public and will join a new brigade of academic, corporate and government entities in that Open Mainframe Project.
IBM will also allow users free access to the LinuxOne cloud which was developed as a mainframe simulation too for developing, testing and executing mainframe applications in Linux.
It’s 2015 and you might think of the mainframe as a vestige of an earlier computing era, but these mega machines still play a role inside large institutions running intensive workloads.
“IBM LinuxONE brings together the flexibility and agility of the open revolution with the industry’s most advanced, trusted and performance enterprise system”. “Driven by customer needs, we are typically first to collaborate with IBM and take advantage of new z Systems capabilities to provide more choice to our customers and innovation to the mainstream Linux kernel”. SUSE and Red Hat already support distribution. Canonical founder Mark Shuttlesworth highlighted IBM’s inclusion of an OpenStack API “in front of” LinuxOne. The project will be helpful for those organizations that use mainframe computers, as per the Linux Foundation. Various universities and security researchers are also involved. It is particularly giving away software that does “IT predictive analytics” – software that monitors huge IT systems for unusual system behavior. “The code can be used by developers to build similar sense and respond resiliency capabilities on other systems”.
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IBM said its Emperor and Rockhopper Linux mainframe servers are available now. Mauri explained, “With a Rockhopper and elastic pricing, this is the least expensive entry option ever for a mainframe”.
