Announcing the new IBM LinuxONE III with Ubuntu

This is a guest blog by Kara Todd, Director, Linux, IBM Z and LinuxONE

Enterprises today need a highly secure, and flexible system to support their initiatives, and for that system to grow and evolve for tomorrow. The latest LinuxONE system was designed to support mission-critical initiatives and allow enterprises to be innovative as they design and scale their environment. LinuxONE III provides features for advanced data protection and privacy, enterprise resiliency and scalability, and cloud enablement and integration. 

Reliability and continuity are critical to the success of any business. With this release, they’ll benefit from increased consolidation for key workloads, and up to 190 cores and 40TB of memory. And with 99.999%* availability, enterprises can confidently run and scale their business-critical workloads. The new LinuxONE III provides the high levels of availability and scalability, so business-critical workloads run flawlessly, recover quickly, and grow seamlessly.

With LinuxONE III enterprises can seamlessly integrate across the stack with hybrid multi-cloud platforms and workloads. And they can now use up to four 19” racks to scale environments using a smaller footprint, providing for ease and economy of growth. This enterprise platform also supports containers with Kubernetes to allow you to build, deploy, manage and scale containerised applications with ease. 

We continue to provide client choice when it comes to Linux distributions with the LinuxONE III. This generation of hardware supports all Ubuntu LTS releases for IBM Z and LinuxONE that are currently in service, including Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those wanting to make use of the latest features, Ubuntu 19.04 is also available. 

By selecting such a popular Linux OS, enterprises benefit from a regular release cadence, upstream releases and a portfolio of tools to manage their multi-cloud deployments including Juju, MAAS and Charmed Kubernetes. Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure will provide the assurance needed for ongoing enterprise-level support.

LinuxONE III provides advanced security on-prem and in the hybrid cloud using Data Privacy Passports, Secure Boot for Linux, Fiber Channel Endpoint Security, Hyper Protect Crypto Services, and Secure Service Container. Not only does this release provide a high level of security, the features operate at greater efficiency than ever before. LinuxONE also supports Blockchain, which continues to mature as new and innovative use cases, such as digital asset custody, emerge in the market. These future-proof features provide peace of mind that your business and your customers’ data is protected.

The LinuxONE platform was already the most secure platform for data serving and with the new LinuxONE system, we add the ability to protect data as it moves across your hybrid multi-cloud through a technology we are calling Data Privacy Passports. 

Enterprises can forge ahead with their mission-critical initiatives and create an innovative environment knowing that your system of choice, LinuxONE III, is one step ahead with the tools and capabilities to protect your business and help you achieve your business goals.

To find out more, visit partners.ubuntu.com or the IBM website.

*ITIC (Information Technology Intelligence Consulting), March 28th, 2019 blog