The birth of a new baby is always exciting, and on 6 February, IBM announced a new mainframe. It’s the IBM LinuxOne 4 Express, so it’s using Linux as its operating system rather than z/OS, and inside the pre-configured rack system is a 5.2GHz Telum processor – the same as runs in the Z16 mainframes.
All those sites that are running multiple Linux servers with multiple staff looking after them, might want to think again about what they are doing because, as I said, the new mainframe isn’t some massive box that needs lots of floor space to house, it’s rack-mounted. And the cost of one of these small but powerful boxes starts at $135,000, which is a very reasonable price in the world of mainframes.
And for those sites that are currently running multiple Linux boxes, IBM is suggesting that moving their Linux workloads from x86 servers to an IBM LinuxONE 4 Express box can save them over 52% on their total cost of ownership over five years. Consolidating the workloads on the new mainframe and off distributed systems gives users the benefits of a highly reliable environment with very small amounts of downtime. It also helps customers to simplify their IT environments. Customers also gain the ability to process large amounts of data using the two levels of physical and two levels of virtual cache, and it does that in an energy-efficient way.
The new mainframe can support hybrid cloud working and sites ramping up their AI usage. It also comes with mainframe-level security. It comes with up to 16 Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) cores, and supports up to 864GB of memory. Of course, the Telum chips provide on-chip AI acceleration, which provides in-transaction inferencing needed for fraud detection, medical imaging, and insurance claims processing. For example, health insurance companies could analyse large volumes of medical records in near real time to validate process claims, increasing the speed of business decision making.
In terms of security, the IBM LinuxOne 4 Express comes with the IBM Secure Execution for Linux capability – a hardware-based security technology that is now built into IBM LinuxONE 4 Express. This scalable isolation protects workload data within virtual machine guests from unauthorized access or modification. In multi-workload environments where data in use could be vulnerable to insider attacks or credential compromise, this is definitely a must-have. And, obviously the workloads are protected from external attacks.
In these days when costs and security can mean the difference between a company staying in business or disappearing from the marketplace, the new IBM LinuxOne 4 Express gives small and medium-sized organizations a good option to choose. Hybrid cloud working is what most companies are doing or working towards, the new machine can handle that. Making greater use of generative and other AI modes of working is similarly on everyone’s radar these days. The new box can do that too. And it has mainframe security levels at its core. So, that means choosing the new box offers future facilities and security. In terms of cost, moving from any number of Linux boxes to a single centralized box will, as mentioned above, realize cost savings for a company. It will also give them better insight into what exactly is going on. Although the cost may seem steep to people unused to mainframe environments, taking a slightly longer look at the accounts should definitely lead to cost savings for any organization.
The IBM LinuxOne 4 Express is an exciting and interesting step for IBM to bring in new customers that previously might have ignored the mainframe world completely and believed the old myths about dinosaurs etc. It's small, it's cheap (relatively), and it's powerful, and I wish it every success.
The new IBM LinuxONE 4 Express will be generally available from IBM and certified business partners on 20 February.
No comments:
Post a Comment