IBM Boosts Hybrid Cloud Capabilities On LinuxONE

IBM is upgrading features on its LinuxONE family of Linux systems with enhanced hybrid cloud capabilities and higher processing power.

According to IBM, the upgrades will help organisations “of all sizes” to develop, deploy and manage applications for the cloud simply and efficiently with robust security.

LinuxONE is IBM’s open source Linux platform family of mainframes and platforms, with Big Blue touting the range’s app economy benefits.

Choice

“IBM is strengthening its expansion into the open community, providing developers more choice and flexibility with LinuxONE,” said Ross Mauri, general manager, IBM z Systems and LinuxONE.

“The platform’s broadened ecosystem and new hybrid cloud capabilities underscore the security, efficiency and performance that clients need, while delivering the flexibility and possibilities of open source they love.”

It was last August when IBM unveiled the LinuxONE platform in a bid to drive mainframe adoption, dumping its mainframe code into the open source community.

The LinuxONE was released in partnership with Ubuntu Linux distributor Canonical. The mainframe is part of IBM’s revamped strategy to ship its mainframes out to a wider market, following positive sales figures earlier in the year.

IBM is has now optimised its Cloudant and StrongLoop technologies for LinuxONE to allow customers to develop, deploy and manage applications across hybrid cloud environments faster and easier. IBM said that the new features offer a scalable environment on Node.js, allowing developers to write apps for the server using whichever coding language they prefer.

IBM is also expanding supported software and capabilities for the LinuxONE. Most recently, IBM LinuxONE ported the Go programming language, which was developed by Google. IBM will begin contributing code to the Go community in the summer. Through work with SUSE to collaborate on technologies in the OpenStack space, SUSE tools will be employed to manage public, private and hybrid clouds running on LinuxONE.

From March, IBM Open Platform (IOP) will be available for the IBM LinuxONE portfolio. IOP, IBM claims, represents a wide set of industry standard Apache-based capabilities for analytics and big data. The components supported include Apache Spark, Apache HBase and more, as well as Apache Hadoop 2.7.1.

IBM cited the UK’s Met Office as one customer of LinuxONE. The weather and climate service uses LinuxONE to process transactions and run analytics.

“It is essential for us to deliver services based on accurate data that paints a full picture, and do so as quickly as possible,” said Graham Mallin,  head of technology, Met Office. “LinuxONE has enabled our organisation to provide our services to clients based on weather and climate data faster, and today’s announcement will enable us to go even further with this life-saving work.”

Take our data centre quiz here!