IBM Starts Renting Cloudy Bare Metal Linux Almost-Mainframes
upstart writes:
LinuxONE servers come to the Big Blue cloud:
IBM has taken a longer-than-usual stride towards making its proprietary hardware platforms cloudier, by offering bare metal LinuxONE boxes in the big blue cloud.
The LinuxONE servers use the same Telum processor IBM packs into its z16 mainframe but are designed solely to run Linux - Big Blue's own z/OS is not allowed.
But IBM promotes LinuxONE as offering just about the same level of hardware resilience as mainframes. The former typewriter champion also asserts that the LinuxOne architecture teamed with Telum trounces x86 for compute density and energy consumption.
And of course Linux is far less exotic that z/OS, making it a platform more independent software vendors will happily target. IBM reckons greenfield sites might fancy LinuxONE too, as it can run Kubernetes and is therefore suggested as a fine platform for cloud-native development.
The Register submits it would be a brave buyer that ignores decades of historical case studies about the perils of lock-in to proprietary platforms and makes LinuxONE the bedrock of a new IT stack. But stranger things have happened.
[...] Analyst firm IDC rates the non-x86 server market as likely to generate $13.1 billion of revenue during 2023, compared to $109.5 billion for kit running CPUs from Intel or AMD. LinuxONE is therefore not a big player and has competition from the aforementioned cloudy Arm machines and IBM's other platforms.
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