With the emergence of big data, cloud, high performance computing, and new engagement technologies, data has become the basis of competitive advantage today, Doug Balog, general manager, IBM Power Systems, emphasized in his keynote at Red Hat Summit 2015 going on this week in Boston. But with these disruptive new forces, organizations must innovate in terms of how they build their infrastructure, he noted.
According to Balog, what organizations need now is a different mindset in order to be ready to compete on analytics, achieve a deeper understanding of customers, and of their product usage.
In 2000, IBM made a $1 billion investment in Linux, including porting Linux to the mainframe, where it is now the only enterprise-grade platform capable of running up to 8,000 virtual servers, said Balog. He cited customers benefiting from the technology, such as Radixx, an airline reservations systems provider, that is consolidating its sprawling server farm onto Linux on z Systems to reduce complexity and save money.
IBM followed that investment up in 2013 with another $1 billion investment in new Linux and open source technologies for Power Systems to help clients capitalize on big data and cloud computing with modern systems that can handle the new wave of applications, said Balog.
Linux is an underpinning of the systems transformation taking place in this new era of IT and the OpenPOWER ecosystem is also built with Linux as the foundation. What Linux brought to software, OpenPOWER is now bringing to hardware, and in fact, OpenPOWER is the world’s first and only open server architecture, Balog observed.
For information about IBM z Systems, go here. For information about IBM Power Systems, go here and for information about the OpenPOWER Foundation, go here.