The Linux Executive Report from IBM
July 23, 2015
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: July 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
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has been launched by The Linux Foundation to advance the state-of-the-art for building cloud native applications and services, allowing developers to take full advantage of existing and to-be-developed open source technologies. Cloud native refers to applications or services that are container-packaged, dynamically scheduled and micro services-oriented.
The opportunities that Docker enables are explored in a new Mainframe Insights blog.
IBM has unveiled developerWorks Open, a cloud-based environment for developers to access emerging IBM technologies and technical expertise, and collaborate with a global network to accelerate projects. IBM will release 50 projects to the open source community to speed enterprise adoption and spur a new class of cloud innovations around mobile, analytics and other high-growth areas.
IBM is in the midst of a transformation resulting from the combined market forces of the need to drive analytics insight from more data, the rise of cloud technologies, and the changing ways in which firms engage with clients due to new workflows, new business models, and new technology.
The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a project managed by The Linux Foundation for identification and funding of critical open source projects, has announced financial support of nearly $500,000 for three new projects to better support critical security elements of today's global information infrastructure.
To enable the next generation of developers, IBM has introduced the Academic Initiative for Cloud. The new program will create cloud development curricula using Bluemix, IBM's platform-as-a-service, in more than 200 universities, reaching more than 20,000 students in 36 countries.
At the recent International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, IBM, along with NVIDIA and two U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories, announced a pair of Centers of Excellence for supercomputing - one at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the other at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The 45th edition of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was recently announced. The new list shows that "Linux is still number one with a bullet when it comes to supercomputing," writes ZDNet Contributing Editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.
Inside Linux at IBM
The developerWorks community focused on the open source ecosystem around Linux on z Systems is your source for technical resources for Linux open source software on Linux on z Systems, including direct access to other Linux on z users, and the development team behind both Linux and z technologies.
IBM has announced the XL C/C++ for Linux, V13.1.2 with support for both big endian and little endian Linux distributions that run on IBM Power Systems. IBM XL C/C++ Compiler is an industry standards-based programming tool used to develop large and complex applications in the C and C++ programming languages.
Learn more about how enterprise-grade Linux on z Systems adds value to Siebel CRM solutions, including the functions that are introduced in the latest version of Siebel CRM. A new solution data sheet summarizes the value of deploying Siebel CRM applications on IBM z Systems running Oracle Database.
IBM has broadened its Linux on POWER offering to include support for Linux little Endian distributions running on IBM POWER8 systems. One great way to boost the performance of your POWER8 systems is to compile your applications with the IBM XL compilers (C/C++ and Fortran).
Inside IBM's Linux Partners
IBM, in collaboration with NVIDIA and Mellanox, has established a POWER Acceleration and Design Center in Montpellier, France, to advance the development of data-intensive research, industrial, and commercial applications. The new center provides commercial and open-source software developers with technical assistance to enable them to develop high performance computing (HPC) applications.
The Linux Foundation is making its LFS201 course, Essentials of Linux System Administration, available in Spanish, and a Portuguese version will be available in the coming months.
The Linux Foundation has announced the R Consortium, a collaborative project hosted at The Linux Foundation.
Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform, an integrated infrastructure platform designed to run, orchestrate and scale multi-container-based applications and services. Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform provides the foundation for production scale container deployments, utilizing the same core enabling technologies as Red Hat OpenShift Enterprise 3, including Docker as a Linux container format, and Kubernetes for container orchestration.
SUSE has expanded its partner program to include support for 64-bit ARM server processors. "SUSE has always been a leader in porting Linux to other platforms, and this program brings the same benefits and interaction to the ARM AArch64 ecosystem that our partners providing x86-64, Power and System z solutions already experience," said Ralf Flaxa, SUSE Vice President of Engineering.
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,
Two conferences, the KVM Forum and Xen Project Developer Summit, are joining forces this summer to co-host a hackathon to foster technical collaboration between the two hypervisors.
KVM is an industry-leading open source hypervisor that provides an ideal platform for data center virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure, and cloud computing. The KVM Forum, scheduled for August 19-21 at the Sheraton Seattle in Seattle, WA, will bring together the community of developers and users that define the KVM ecosystem.
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.
LinuxCon enables developers, sys admins, architects and all levels of technical talent to gather together under one roof for education, collaboration and problem-solving to further the Linux platform. This year, LinuxCon will take place August 17-19 at the Sheraton Seattle, in Seattle, WA, and IBM is a Platinum Sponsor of the conference.
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.
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.
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.