IBM HAS ANNOUNCED what it describes as the single biggest donation of mainframe code to the open source community, despite reeling from even more financial losses.
Over 250,000 lines of code are being dropped, including predictive analytics code which appears in other IBM systems. This technology can now be transferred into other Linux builds.
The result is two Linux mainframe servers, one of which will be called LinuxOne, which are set to be the most powerful of their type ever produced.
As part of the announcement, the Linux Foundation will form a new Open Mainframe Project with collaboration from "nearly a dozen" organisations to encourage the adoption of Linux on mainframes.
LinuxOne will bring many industry open source standard tools to IBM z system machines for the first time, including Apache Spark, Node.js, MongoDB, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Chef. IBM is also working with Canonical on a version of Ubuntu for IBM z.
The code drop contains a number of features which will benefit the wider open source community, bringing IBM mainframe features for performance improvement, including pre-emptive maintenance to avoid problems before they occur.
LinuxOne Emperor (below) is the more powerful of the two builds, based around use of the z13 mainframe to create systems of up to 8,000 virtual machines and thousands of containers, able to analyse for fraud in real time and making it a great choice for e-commerce.
LinuxOne Rockhopper is a pared down version designed for emerging markets. Both have encryption locked down in the hardware and software, including Protected-key, which offers extra protection with a 28x performance improvement over regular secure-key technology.
UbuntuOne continues IBM's pioneering work on virtualisation on mainframes, and the firm has partnered with Suse to provide support for the new platform's KVM hypervisor service.
LinuxOne is available today with free access to the LinuxOne Developer Cloud, a virtual R&D engine allowing anyone interested to try the platform. µ
