- While IBM (NYSE:IBM +0.1%) has supported Linux on its System z mainframes for 15 years, its new LinuxONE systems are the first mainframes to exclusively run on the open-source OS, and thus eschew IBM's proprietary z/OS.
- A high-end mainframe called LinuxONE Emperor (named after the penguin) supports up to 8K virtual machines or hundreds of thousands of lightweight app containers. The less powerful LinuxONE Rockhopper (ditto) is said to be "designed for clients and emerging markets seeking the speed, security and availability of the mainframe but in a smaller package."
- Like System z mainframes, LinuxONE supports Red Hat (RHT +0.5%) and SUSE's Linux distributions, while also adding support for Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution. Big Blue also promises to support a slew of open-source software tools/platforms popular with Linux users, such as MariaDB (database), Apache Spark (in-memory big data engine, an area of interest for IBM), and Docker (container platform).
- Notably, IBM will offer subscription-based/pay-as-you-go pricing options for LinuxONE, as it tries to win over businesses worried about the traditional up-front costs of deploying a mainframe.
- Thanks to an upgrade cycle, IBM's mainframe revenue rose 9% Y/Y in Q2 and 118% in Q1, after falling sharply in 2014. After adjusting for the highs and lows of cycles, servers based on Intel's Xeon CPUs have been gradually taking share from mainframes for years.