Linux on IBM Z at 20 Years, the History and the Vision

Linux is the lingua franca throughout the mobile and cloud ecosystem. It has also become pervasive in the hybrid cloud, and is built into the firmware of every IBM Z and LinuxONE server we ship. Today, IBM is announcing three very special Linux anniversaries:

• 20 years ago, a pioneering project at IBM's Boeblingen development labs led to the porting of Linux to IBM Z - and a remarkable synergy between IBM's enterprise servers and the emerging Linux and open source communities began
• 5 years ago, IBM launched IBM LinuxONE to bring enterprise Linux servers to new markets clients and use cases
• 1 year ago IBM announced our intention to bring Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks to IBM Z and LinuxONE - and in February IBM made Red Hat OpenShift generally available for IBM Z. Today, over one hundred IBM Z customers are evaluating and using Red Hat OpenShift

The platform today - new features that support your needs

The LinuxONE III is capable of executing up to 1 trillion HTTPS transactions per day on a single server, representing a truly groundbreaking achievement in scale.

Additionally, LinuxONE and Z support a Secure Execution Environment, which isolates and hardens virtual machines, preventing both external and internal attack. With this level of isolation at the virtual machine level, Secure Execution provides multi-tenancy security for Trusted Execution Environments at a scale that cannot be matched in the industry.

Of course it's impossible to run a LinuxONE without Linux, and we continue our close partnership with all three of our distribution vendors: Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical.

We continue a strong set of deliveries at the virtualization layer, with z/VM serving as the hypervisor layer for Red Hat OpenShift deployments. Capable of scaling-out to 2.4 million containers in a single LinuxONE III system, z/VM continues to prove its value from improving the consolidation ratio in Oracle deployments to ensuring our hybrid cloud story has a solid virtualization backbone. 

Finally, our hybrid cloud stack has been a primary focus this year, and it continues to strengthen. Cloud Infrastructure Center is a new User Provisioned Infrastructure (UPI) offering from IBM that provides the underpinning for Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform. Speaking of which, since announcing that Red Hat OpenShift would be coming to the platform a year ago, we have released new updates continuously, starting with OpenShift 4.2 in February through to the latest OpenShift 4.5 in July.

The next 20 years - what does the future hold?

Linux on Z has grown to be a billion dollar business (between hardware, software and services), and that's because our most innovative and committed clients to the Z platform are also our most active Linux clients. Here are just some of the ways that clients use the platform today.

Hybrid Cloud - These days, it's a hybrid IT world, and clients who go this route get 2.5x more value, than they would going it as a public cloud, alone. With Linux as the foundation and Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks as the standardizing layer for a container-based management and development platform, our clients can be fully hybrid cloud enabled

IT Consolidation - A new approach to consolidation of database workloads allows clients to addresses software licensing challenges. We've also addressed the desire for a full solution, such that customers can deploy with the support of IBM Storage, Red Hat and IBM Services in one

Analytics and AI - Providing analytics at the point of impact for the highest performance has become increasingly important. That's why clients are using analytics acceleration features such as IBM Db2 Analytics Accelerator as a supporting platform for the Db2 database running on z/OS

Business Model Innovation - The security features on our platform are unmatched in the industry and mean clients interested in testing out new business models, such as Digital Asset Custody and Blockchain, can try them out and do them at scale

Next Gen Security - As Confidential Computing emerges in the industry, IBM's deployment of a Trusted Execution Environment approach both on premises and into the IBM Cloud is truly market leading

For more on this anniversary, the history, the voices and the vision of the future, head to the IBM newsroom, for a curated set of blogs, interviews and videos from pioneers in the industry, at: https://newsroom.ibm.com/linux-on-z