IBM Enhances LinuxONE for Hybrid Cloud Environments

Expanded ecosystem accelerates business transformation for service providers, small and mid-size businesses

Dubai, UAE, January 27, 2016:   IBM (NYSE: IBM) has announced new technology features and collaborations for its LinuxONE family of high-performance Linux systems. The enhancements will enable organizations of all sizes to develop, deploy and manage applications for the cloud simply and efficiently with robust security. 

“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.”

IBM LinuxONE gives clients in the region and abroad the choice they desire with the consistency they need in the cloud with new enhancements: 

• New Hybrid Cloud Capabilities IBM is optimizing its Cloudant and StrongLoop technologies for LinuxONE. The new features will offer a highly scalable environment on Node.js, which enables developers to write applications for the server side using the language they prefer.
• Ecosystem Growth – IBM is expanding supported software and capabilities for LinuxONE. IBM LinuxONE recently ported the Go programming language, which was developed by Google. Go is designed for building simple, reliable and efficient software, making it easier for developers to combine the software tools they know and love with the speed, security and scale offered by LinuxONE. IBM will begin contributing code to the Go community in the summer.
• Enhanced Systems – IBM is announcing refreshed versions of the LinuxONE family, which includes the Emperor and Rockhopper, to improve speed and processing power.  In March, IBM Open Platform (IOP) will be available for the IBM LinuxONE portfolio at no cost. IOP represents a broad set of industry standard Apache-based capabilities for analytics and big data. 

Following an intent announced last year, Canonical is offering its Ubuntu Linux distribution and cloud tool sets (Juju, MAAS, Landscape) to LinuxONE clients.  With the addition of Ubuntu to the existing SUSE and Red Hat distributions, organizations now have a third option for acquiring the LinuxONE system.

LinuxONE, introduced in August 2015, is enabled for a broad range of popular open source and ISV tools including Apache Spark, Node.js, MongoDB, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Chef and Docker. The new LinuxONE systems availability is currently scheduled for March.