IBM upgrades the Linux mainframe, increasing AI availability and performance

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The mainframe, the hardware that has been around for decades, continues to be a force for the modern age.

Among the vendors still building mainframes is IBM, which today announced the latest iteration of its Linux-focused mainframe system, dubbed LinuxOne Emperor 4. IBM has been building LinuxOne systems since 2015, when the first Emperor mainframe was released. debuted, and updated the platform over a cadence of about two years.

LinuxOne Emperor 4 is based on the IBM z16 mainframe announced by IBM in April. While the z16 is optimized for IBM's z/OS operating system, the LinuxOne, unsurprisingly, is all about Linux and, to a large extent, the cloud-native Kubernetes platform for data orchestration. containers.

"It only runs Linux and it's really meant to meet the needs of people running Linux-based infrastructure in data centers by providing them with a new paradigm on how to run a more efficient and efficient Linux environment. more scalable." Marcel Mitran, IBM Fellow, CTO of Cloud Platform, IBM LinuxONE, told VentureBeat.

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LinuxOne is part of IBM's overall hardware portfolio, which is competitive with other silicon architectures, including x86, which is developed by Intel and AMD.

IBM is also building the Power-based architecture, which can also be optimized for Linux deployments. In July, IBM announced a new line of Power10 servers for enterprise use cases. Across its portfolio of mainframe and power systems, IBM saw revenue growth in its most recent fiscal quarter, with mainframe revenue up 69%.

Mainframes and, in particular, LinuxOne continue to be adopted by financial services organizations around the world. Among IBM's LinuxOne users is Citibank, which uses the mainframe system alongside the MongoDB database to power some of its critical financial services.

Inside LinuxOne Emperor 4

The new LinuxOne Emperor 4 system supports 32 IBM Telum processors, which are built on a 7nm process. The system provides up to 40TB of RAIM (Redundant Array of Independent Memory) and was designed with quantum cryptographic algorithms to help provide a high degree of security.