New Linux mainframes show hardware isn’t dead at IBM

Big Blue is rolling out new mainframes focusing on open source Linux, a sure sign that hardware isn’t quite dead at IBM. Mainframes remain a profit center even as IBM has shed in recent years its PCs, printers, point-of-sale and x86 server businesses as well as semiconductors.

“IBM Bets Big on Linux on the Mainframe,” IBM declared, noting that a third of its mainframe clients already are running Linux. The new offerings also include software and services.

A longtime partner with Raleigh-based Red Hat in Linux development and support, the IBM announcement made at the annual Linux World conference, made only passing mention of the Hatters. But IBM certainly played up partnerships with Red Hat rivals SUSE and Ubuntu.

Interestingly, as website SeekingAlpha notes, IBM is also seeing to track customers with subscription prices. “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,” Seeking Alpha pointed out.

Most recent IBM headlines have focused on “Watson” supercomputer-related efforts and its mushrooming cloud strategy. But hard iron still has a place, it appears, in Chair and CEO Ginni Rometty’s strategy.

The new servers also build off IBM’s declaration in June that it’s committing “hundreds of millions of dollars” and some 3,500 jobs to big data Apache Spark software.

“Fifteen years ago IBM surprised the industry by putting Linux on the mainframe, and today more than a third of IBM mainframe clients are running Linux,” said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems, ina announcing the new servers.

“We are deepening our commitment to the open source community by combining the best of the open world with the most advanced system in the world in order to help clients embrace new mobile and hybrid cloud workloads. Building on the success of Linux on the mainframe, we continue to push the limits beyond the capabilities of commodity servers that are not designed for security and performance at extreme scale.”

By working with the top Linux developers and distributors, IBM calls the new servers “a significant expansion of the mainframe’s strategy of embracing open source-based technologies and open-source communities to provide clients with the most secure, highest performance capabilities for an era where mainframes increasingly anchor corporate analytics and hybrid clouds.”

IBM chose to keep mainframes even as it sold off the x86 business to Lenovo last year. As Bloomberg noted, the mainframes are essential to riving revenues in what’s left of iBM hardware: IBM “has relied on sales of the mainframe to boost hardware revenue, which fell 32 percent last quarter, or a 5 percent gain when excluding the impact from divestitures and currency exchange,” Bloomberg noted.

Called the LinuxONE Emperor, the biggest of the new servers is based on IBM’s latest z13 model. Big Blue says it can support up to 8,000 “virtual machines” or “thousands of containers.” That’s the most on any Linux server, according to IBM.

The second server, known as Rockhopper, operates at a smaller scale.

IBM also is donating a huge amount of code for open source research and development through the Open Mainframe Project.