August 17 2015: IBM today announced a significant expansion of the mainframe's strategy of embracing open source-based technologies and open-source communities.
The company hopes to provide clients with the most secure, highest performance capabilities for an era where mainframes increasingly anchor corporate analytics and hybrid clouds.
IBM bet big on open in the enterprise in three ways:
- The company is introducing two Linux mainframe servers – called LinuxONE – that are claimed to be the industry's most powerful and secure enterprise servers designed for the new application economy and hybrid cloud era.
- Deepening open source software enablement – IBM will enable open source and industry tools and software including Apache Spark, Node.js, MongoDB, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Chef on z Systems to provide clients with choice and flexibility for hybrid cloud deployments. SUSE, which provides Linux distribution for the mainframe, will now support KVM, giving clients a new hypervisor option. Canonical and IBM also announced plans to create an Ubuntu distribution for LinuxONE and z Systems. The collaboration with Canonical brings Ubuntu's scale-out and cloud expertise to the IBM z Systems platform, further expanding its reach and support.
Contributing the single largest amount of mainframe code to open source community – The code, designed to fuel digital transformation, includes technology from IBM's mainframe to help enterprises identify issues and help prevent failures before they happen, help improve performance across platforms and enable better integration with the broader network and cloud. ( source IBM announcement)