Delivering the opening keynotes at LinuxCon North America for IBM, a Diamond Sponsor of the event, Dr. Angel Diaz, Vice President, Cloud Architecture and Technology, IBM, and Ross Mauri, General Manager of z Systems, IBM, reflected on the change taking place in the IT world.
"We have been building on the shoulders of giants for many years," stated Diaz, observing that with great power comes great responsibility - to deliver better outcomes for business and the world. To enable this, he said, there must be a focus on code, community, and culture. Code, community, and culture were critical to making Linux successful and will also be necessary to propel new open source innovation that a future generation will build on to create things that can't even be imagined now.
"Major disruption is upon us" in the form of mobile technology, said Mauri. "It is changing the industry and changing society. It is placing new expectations on all of us." Each mobile transaction can touch off as many as 30, 40 or even 100 separate transactions, and to handle this starburst effect, and the pressure it places on IT new breakthroughs need to occur in two places. "We need to take the best of Linux and open and combine that with the best of the enterprise," Mauri said.
The new LinuxONE systems, whose names, "Emperor" and "Rockhopper," pay homage to species of penguins, will help answer the growing enterprise requirements and offer unmatched security and high availability, Mauri explained. The Emperor is capable of handling transactions in real time, and scaling up to 8,000 virtual machines or thousands of containers, while the Rockhopper provides an entry point to the portfolio in a smaller package.
In conjunction with LinuxONE, IBM is introducing a set of solutions around mobile, analytics, cloud, and DevOps, as well offering a new cloud-like approach to pricing. In addition, he said, the new Open Mainframe Project launched by The Linux Foundation will bring together a host of organizations, including CA, SUSE, Canonical, EMC, IBM, and others to collaborate on the mainframe and make Linux even more powerful.
Linux is key to the future of the mainframe, Mauri said, pointing out that it is the fastest growing operating system on the platform. The new project will be a catalyst for future innovation for Linux on the mainframe, providing a place for people to come together for collaboration and education.