The Linux Executive Report from IBM
August 21, 2015
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: August 21, 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
A Forbes article by Greg Satell recounts events that led to IBM's metamorphosis starting in 1993 from a company whose business model was predicated on proprietary products and systems to one with an enduring commitment to open source.
Enabling greater access in the developer community, IBM is making the largest single contribution of mainframe code to the open source community. A key part of the mainframe code contributions are IT predictive analytics that constantly monitor for unusual system behavior and help prevent issues from turning into failures. The code can be used by developers to build similar sense and respond resiliency capabilities on other systems.
To help developers - from novice to experienced - learn how to connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the cloud and how to use data coming from those connected devices, IBM has launched a new community, IBM developerWorks Recipes.
IBM Fellow Donna Dillenberger demonstrates the new IBM LinuxONE system capabilities for scalable financial trading at the LinuxCon 2015 conference.
At LinuxCon North America in Seattle, IBM announced it is introducing two Linux mainframe servers - called LinuxONE - that are the industry's most powerful and secure enterprise servers designed for the new application economy and hybrid cloud era.
In a new Smarter Planet blog post, Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President, IBM Systems, reflects on what IBM's embrace of Linux on the mainframe has meant for the open software movement, for IBM, and for entrepreneurs and businesses - and what the new LinuxONE means for the future of the open source movement.
IBM LinuxONE is a portfolio of hardware, software and services solutions for an enterprise-grade Linux environment, bringing together the flexibility and agility of the open revolution with the industry's most advanced, trusted and performance enterprise system.
A new blog post penned by IBM's Jeff Borek, who is also Chairman of DGAB, provides a recap of developments at the recent DockerCon 2015 in San Francisco, and looks at some of the initiatives that will impact the Docker Project and its ecosystem.
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.
Inside Linux at IBM
Jesse Proudman, Founder and CTO of Blue Box, an IBM company, writes about the latest addition to the IBM cloud family, Monty Taylor (OpenStack rock star), in a recent blog post.
IBM announced that its inventors have received more than 400 new cloud patents in 2015. Furthermore, over the last 18 months, IBM has secured nearly 1,200 cloud patents, bolstering the company's ability to deliver innovative new cloud services, solutions and capabilities to clients across all industries. The new IBM cloud patents comprise a wide range of innovations, including enhancing and improving the speed of deployment and security of cloud data centers, as well as easing the management of cloud applications, storage and maintenance.
Each year, The Channel Company's CRN Annual Report Card (ARC) Survey recognizes the best-in-class vendors in the categories of partnership, support and product innovation, based on the votes of thousands of solution providers.
Inside IBM's Linux Partners
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is now available to support IBM Power Systems running the SAP HANA platform. The solutions can be tailored to meet enterprise customer requirements for mission-critical, real-time analytics with high reliability, availability and serviceability.
Linux and KVM Events
With the confluence of disruptive new forces, including big data, cloud, high performance computing, and new engagement technologies, organizations must innovate in terms of how they build their infrastructure,
The Linux Foundation has announced the keynote speakers and schedule for LinuxCon, CloudOpen and Embedded Linux Conference Europe, taking place October 5-7, 2015 in Dublin, Ireland.
The dates of next year's Red Hat Summit have been announced. The 12th annual Red Hat Summit will take place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from June 28-July 1, 2016.
SUSECon is the annual global technical conference for SUSE customers, partners and community enthusiasts, geared to the needs of the enterprise IT consumer. SUSECon provides the forum to announce and demonstrate the SUSE vision and latest technical advances to press, analysts, ecosystem partners, and customers.
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.
The world's most innovative companies are using z Systems to reshape the fabric of our businesses, our infrastructures, and our lives. They analyze big data to help their organizations, use mobile apps to better deliver products to customers and deploy secure and reliable cloud infrastructures to improve efficiency and economics.
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.
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.
Ron Peri, CEO of Radixx International, discussed hybrid cloud and improving TCO with IBM zSystems in a presentation that was recorded at IBM InterConnect 2015.
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.