IBM has ramped up efforts to make mainframes sexy again by adding hybrid cloud capabilities, along with other goodies, to its LinuxOne offering. The Linux-based mainframe was released last year with ability to scale out to 8000 virtual servers. Here’s what you need to know.
LinuxOne comes in two sizes: Emperor, which is the big daddy of the product line, can scale to 8000 servers, thousands of containers and support millions of active users. Rockhopper is the baby brother that can be upgraded to become the Emperor later down the track. IBM has recently boosted the speed and processing power of the Rockhopper.
In this new update, IBM has optimised Cloudant, an enterprise-grade NoSQL database for hybrid clouds, and StrongLoop technologies for LinuxOne, offering a highly scalable cross-platform environment for web applications on the Node.js. This lets developers write applications for the server side using the language they prefer.
IBM is also hoping its recent move of porting the Go programming language, developed by Google, to LinuxOne would curry favour with developers. Go is designed for creating simple, reliable and efficient software. IBM will begin contributing code to the Go community later in the year.
According to IBM, the new capabilities will allow organisations to develop, deploy and manage applications for the cloud with ease. The company is also making its IBM Open Platform (IOP), used for analytics and big data, free for LinuxOne in March.
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