Perhaps you remember those massive machines with glowing lights and whirring 9-track tape drives when you think about mainframes. How circumstances have evolved. In most small to medium-sized enterprises (SMBs) these days, Big Blue’s most recent IBM LinuxONE 4 Express, a pre-configured rack mount system, would pass muster.
The newest mainframe in the Rockhopper family, the IBM LinuxONE 4 Express, has up to 16 Integrated Facility for Linux (IFLs) available. The IBM 8-core Telum CPU, clocked at 4.6GHz, powers these Linux-only system boards. Up to 864GB of of memory can be supported by this 7nm design processor. Holding? Since it is rack mountable, you may include almost any type of storage.
There is also an AI coprocessor on the Telum chip. The intention is to give you the ability to handle transactions with AI almost instantly. IBM, for instance, asserts that you may detect financial transaction fraud using the Telum chip before it can be executed. Consider me impressed.
The new mainframe is also engineered to guarantee 99.999999% (eight 9s) availability when running Red Hat’s own Kubernetes OpenShift Container Platform when combined with IBM’s GDPS software and DS8000 series storage with HyperSwap.
“With the new LinuxONE 4 Express solution, IBM is uniquely positioned to handle mission-critical workloads with high availability,” stated Steven Dickens, vice president and practice leader at The Futurum Group. This with the system’s cybersecurity posture puts IBM in a strong position to gain traction in the industry.”
Online safety? With the new mini-mainframe, IBM Secure Execution for Linux is included. This is a hardware-based security mechanism that prevents the server environment from viewing or altering data that is run in Linux Kernel Virtual Machines (KVM) guests. Individual workloads can be safeguarded against both insider dangers and external attacks with Secure Execution. This covers data in use, which is a crucial security step for use cases involving digital assets.
AI may be utilised to safely run medical imaging applications with secured data by utilising all of these features. Health insurance firms, for instance, might verify process claims by analysing massive amounts of medical records almost instantly.
It can also be used for more conventional mainframe tasks like workload consolidation. According to IBM, customers can reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) by more than 52% over a five-year period by migrating Linux workloads from a comparable x86 server to an IBM LinuxONE 4 Express.
Furthermore, Red Hat products can be utilised to create hybrid clouds using the LinuxONE 4 Express. “IBM LinuxONE 4 Express is a chance for startups and small to medium-sized businesses to build an intentional hybrid cloud strategy from the ground up,” stated Tina Tarquinio, vice president of product management for IBM Z and LinuxONE. With the most recent LinuxONE 4 system, IBM combines the power of AI and the hybrid cloud into a straightforward, user-friendly design that works in a variety of data centres.”
According to IBM’s director of Z and LinuxONE hardware product management Rick Schoonmaker, “The new LinuxONE 4 Express is built to simplify the experience for SMBs and start-ups by offering three pre-configured machine sizes and pricing options as well as full solution add-on packages.”
