The Linux Executive Report from IBM
April 23, 2015
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: April 23, 2015. A monthly summary of important trends and market research, case studies and information about IBM's Linux initiatives of interest to senior management.
Linux News
In a new blog post Bruce Wile, Chief Engineer, CAPI, writes about the significance of CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) to the POWER8 Systems.
With new industry-specific cloud data services and developer tools, IBM will expand on that expertise to help clients and partners integrate data from the growing number of IoT and traditional sources. These resources will be made available on an open platform to provide manufacturers with the ability to design and produce a new generation of connected devices that are better optimized for IoT, and to help business leaders across industries create systems that better fuse enterprise and IoT data to inform decision-making.
The Linux Foundation has announced the release of Linux 4.0. Much has been made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but that was not the only reason for the version number change, said Linux creator Linus Torvalds in his release notes. "We've had much bigger changes in other versions," Torvalds added. "So this is very much a ‘solid code progress' release."
Following up on The Linux Foundation's release of its 2015 report, "Linux Kernel Development: How Fast It is Going, Who is Doing It, What They Are Doing and Who is Sponsoring It," journalist Paul Rubens observes in a CIO.com article that the idea of Linux as anti-establishment and developed by independent programmers has become an outdated notion.
In a new blog post, IBM's Loc Thai writes about the TurboLAMP stack, a high performance LAMP stack, offering the performance and scalability required for demanding cloud, mobile, and big data solutions.
Companies are turning to Linux for new mission-critical workloads. In fact, 73% of enterprises currently run their mission critical workloads on Linux, and 80% of z Systems top accounts run Linux on z Systems.
Inside IBM's Linux Partners
The Linux Foundation has announced it will host the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and its Let's Encrypt project, a free, automated and open security certificate authority for the public's benefit. Let's Encrypt allows website owners to obtain security certificates within minutes, enabling a safer web experience.
The winners of the annual Red Hat North American Partner Awards were announced at an event during the Red Hat North American Partner Conference in Orlando. The recipients were honored for their work in the commercial and public sector channels and were chosen based on their ability to successfully deliver innovative open source solutions to customers.
Linux and KVM Events
At Edge2015 - The Infrastructure Innovation Conference, you will experience a multifaceted event culminating in a best-in-class Executive Summit and three Technical Universities: Storage Systems, z Systems, and Power Systems. Business luminaries will share best practices on how they have used new technologies, like mobile, to target new customers to create new revenue streams or how they created more secure environments for themselves and their customers. Registration is now open for Edge2015, which will be held May 11-15, 2015, at The Venetian in Las Vegas.
The Linux Foundation is launching a new event in 2015 dedicated to bringing together leading developers and contributors of Linux containers with the Linux kernel developer community. The event called ContainerCon will be co-located with LinuxCon + CloudOpen North America in Seattle, August 17-19, 2015.
LinuxCon Japan presented by The Linux Foundation is the premiere Linux conference in Asia that brings together a unique blend of core developers, administrators, users, community managers and industry experts.
Red Hat Summit brings together thought leaders and executives from across the technology industry to participate in keynotes and sessions on community, innovation, collaboration and customer success.
The Linux Foundation has announced its 2015 events schedule, which includes LinuxCon and CloudOpen in North America and Europe, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Embedded Linux Conference, Android Builders Summit and ApacheCon, as well as new events for 2015, open source storage and filesystems conference, Vault, and ContainerCon, focused on the rapidly expanding container industry.
Linux and KVM Success Stories
According to an article in CIO Journal by Steven Norton, in an effort to lower software costs and become more agile, Avis Budget Group Inc. will run open-source Linux software over its IBM mainframe. Avis is using an integrated facility for Linux (IFL), "essentially a processor that runs Linux workloads on an IBM mainframe," writes Norton.
Challenged to do more with less, Dundee City Council identified IT as an area in which it could cut costs. The council consolidated its Oracle Database environment supporting critical services from distributed servers to an IBM zEnterprise BC12 platform, dramatically improving efficiency.
EVERTEC, Inc., based in Puerto Rico, offers a comprehensive suite of services for core bank processing, cash processing and technology outsourcing. The company processes billions of financial transactions annually and must ensure 24/7 responsiveness and availability for its systems - or risk failing to provide customers with access to key services.
IBM Research and SCA are partnering to create a shared service cloud for the municipalities of New York that is predicted to eliminate 25% of government's IT budget by streamlining applications and connecting siloed municipalities. The IBM mainframe is the platform that New York trusts to host that cloud. In addition to its time-tested scalability, reliability and security, it offers the lowest total cost of ownership — supporting the state as it strives for reduced spending and a smarter, future-ready IT infrastructure.
Kenya Power is the sole electricity provider for more than 2.2 million customers throughout the country. With a goal to provide universal electricity access by 2020, Kenya Power implemented the IBM Mainframe for its mission-critical systems, significantly improving reliability with fewer unscheduled outages.
IBM Business Partner L3C LLP focuses on three ways to help businesses across the UK increase profitability and reduce costs: consultancy, managed services and complementary IT resources. L3C deployed IBM System z servers running Linux to provide companies of any size — including small, midsized and very large enterprises — with scalable, cost-effective, high-performance cloud services.
A recently released IDC White Paper examines the rapidly changing landscape for managed service providers and the shifting competitive dynamics of the market as cloud-based solutions increasingly challenge older models of third-party application infrastructure procurement and management.
Think administering z/VM will be difficult? Think again. With IBM Wave for z/VM (IBM Wave) with Oracle, IT organizations can unleash the power of z/VM virtualization, improve productivity, simplify management, and accelerate the cloud journey with innovative technology that helps reduce the barriers to management of virtualized environments.
The Met Office, the United Kingdom's national weather service, provides early, accurate severe weather reports. It strives to transform weather intelligence into a tool for business performance — and its goal is to empower organizations to use weather as an advantage. To process the massive amount of data it receives, the Met Office uses an IBM supercomputer that runs more than 100 trillion calculations in a second.
Increasing numbers of companies are recognizing the benefits of outsourcing IT services to the cloud, presenting managed service providers (MSPs) with a unique opportunity to grow their client base and revenues. Vissensa is a privately owned company headquartered in Fleet in the United Kingdom that offers technical solutions, including hosted and managed services either on or off-premises as best suits a client's requirements.
Check out the customer testimonials in this new e-book to find out how your peers are exploiting z Systems and Linux for competitive advantage.