IBM’s new LinuxONE offers easy hybrid cloud deployment

BENGALURU: 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 says that its LinuxONE gives clients 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 into LinuxONE to enable clients to develop, deploy and manage applications for the cloud more quickly and easily. The new features do not require that developers convert languages, speeding time to development and deployment.

Cloudant, an enterprise-grade fully managed NoSQL database, stores data in JSON format, common for mobile data, enabling users to save time by storing data natively in the system, without the need to first convert it to a different language. StrongLoop provides enterprise-class tools for developing APIs using Node.js, the environment based on JavaScript. This enables developers to write applications for the server side natively.

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. Through new 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.

In addition, IBM has proven that the LinuxONE Emperor is capable of supporting up to one million Docker containers – enabling businesses to unlock insights from massive volumes of data generated by the Internet of Things (IoT).

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. The components supported include Apache Spark, Apache HBase and more, as well as Apache Hadoop 2.7.1. Continuing its commitment to contributing back to the open source community, IBM has optimized the Open Managed Runtime project (OMR) for LinuxONE. T his repurposes the IBM innovations in virtual machine technology for new dynamic scripting languages, infusing them with enterprise-grade strength.

“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.”

Clients using the platform benefit from its powerful right-time insights capabilities. The UK Met Office , a leader in climate and weather services for the public, business and government, uses LinuxONE to process transactions and run analytics to derive insights more quickly than before to deliver critical information in real-time.

“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, Executive Head of Technology, Met Office. “LinuxONE has enabled our organization 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.”

Following an intent announced last year, Canonical is offering its Ubuntu Linux distribution and cloud tool sets (Juju, MAAS, Landscape) to LinuxONE clients, which, in coming months, will enable them to take advantage of LXD, a hypervisor designed for Docker and full system containers. 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 2016.