The Linux Executive Report from IBM
June 25, 2015
The Linux Executive Report from IBM: June 25, 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 United Kingdom's Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson has announced a £313 million partnership with IBM to boost big data research in the U.K. Following on from the government's £113 million commitment in the Autumn Statement to expand the Hartree Centre at Daresbury over the next 5 years, IBM will further support the project with a package of technology and onsite expertise worth up to £200 million.
IBM has acquired Blue Box Group, Inc., a managed private cloud provider built on OpenStack. Blue Box is a privately held company based in Seattle that provides businesses with a simple, private cloud as a service platform, enabling customers to more easily deploy workloads across hybrid cloud environments.
At DockerCon in San Francisco, IBM introduced enterprise-class containers that make it easier for clients to deliver production applications across their hybrid environments. IBM Containers, based on Docker and built on Bluemix, IBM's platform-as-a-service, provide a more efficient environment that enables faster integration and access to analytics, big data and security services.
IDC reports that IBM achieved worldwide server factory revenue growth of 66.1% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2015 in $250K+ servers. According to IDC, IBM achieved industry-leading 63.6% revenue share in $250K+ servers in the quarter, with z Systems growing 118% year-to-year.
As data and analytics are embedded into the fabric of business and society - from popular apps to the Internet of Things (IoT) - Spark brings essential advances to large-scale data processing. First, it dramatically improves the performance of data dependent apps. Second, it radically simplifies the process of developing intelligent apps, which are fueled by data.
Neil Cattermull recaps recent open source announcements by IBM in an article oncomparethecloud.net. "IBM turned up in an unlikely location with their new z13 mainframe technology yesterday. MongoDB World is running this week in New York and is a typical open source conference - a strange place for IBM to turn up with their mainframe technology, right?" observes Cattermull.
IBM has announced SuperVessel, an initiative that enables business partners, application developers and university students to conduct innovation, development and learning for the growing OpenPOWER ecosystem. SuperVessel, an open access cloud service created by Beijing's IBM Research and IBM Systems Labs, is now available to the global community of developers who want to participate in the OpenPOWER ecosystem.
Red Hat has announced Red Hat Atomic Enterprise Platform, an integrated infrastructure platform designed to run, orchestrate and scale multi-container-based applications and services, at Red Hat Summit 2015. This new offering is available through an early access program.
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.
The Linux Foundation plans to present Apache: Big Data, a new event to bring together leading committers of Apache projects to advance big data technologies. The first Apache: Big Data event will be held in Budapest, September 28-30, and takes the place of the former ApacheCon event.
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.
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.
Inside IBM's Linux Partners
The Node.js and io.js developer communities are collaborating to merge their respective code bases and continue their work in a neutral forum, the Node.js Foundation, hosted by The Linux Foundation. The intent to form the Node.js Foundation was announced earlier this year with the purpose of supporting the ongoing growth and evolution of the platform, while maintaining a collaborative environment.
Linux and KVM Events
Join IBM for a two-day workshop for running Oracle DB on Linux on z Systems at the IBM Client Center at IBM Germany Research & Development, in Boeblingen, Germany.
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.
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.
With a focus on open source software, architecture, frameworks, and tools, OSCON is where developers, innovators, businesspeople, and investors come together. At OSCON, you'll find everything open source: languages, communities, best practices, products and services.
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.