IBM Brings Big Guns To Linux Party With Gargantuan Enterprise Mainframes

IBM has come out with some powerful hardware which aims to boost the popularity of mainframe servers running the Linux open source OS in large organisations. The vendor has introduced the LinuxOne line with a mainframe that can scale out to 8000 virtual servers. Here’s more information on the announcement.

Image: IBM LinuxOne Emperor

The IBM LinuxOne product line features two mainframes: Emperor and Rockhopper.

LinuxOne Emperor is the more powerful system out of the two and can scale to 8000 virtual servers, thousands of containers and millions of active users. At maximum capacity, it can carry 141 of the world’s fastest processors with 10TB of shared memory and 640 dedicated I/O processors. Rockhopper is a smaller scale mainframe but can be upgraded to the Emperor system later down the track.

Because the systems run on Linux, users will have the flexibility to choose the databases, containers and analytics tools they want to run on the Emperor or Rockhopper. They are both compatible with a range of open source software such as Apache Spark, Node.js, MongoDB, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Chef. Based on the z13 mainframe, the new systems are able to handle high volumes of mobile transactions.

But the biggest draw card is that, at scale, the LinuxOne mainframes cost half as much as public cloud environments, according to IBM. This will surely pique the interest of business decision makers that are keen to keep IT costs down.

IBM has created a neat little video that provide rundown of LinuxOne:

[Via IBM LinuxOne page]


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