Earlier this week IBM announced the introduction of the Express version of its LinuxOne III mainframe range, which was launched exactly a year ago. This is an entry-level model designed for enterprise customers looking to adopt OpenShift and take advantage of much cheaper-than-x86 processing of relevant workloads.
My Figure above shows the spending on severs by operating system. It demonstrates the trends towards Linux, away from Unix and the dominance of Windows (used on almost all low-end systems). The self-built hyper-converged systems used in the largest public clouds aren’t counted here; if they were – the growth of Linux would be significantly higher.
What is it announcing?
The LinuxONE III Express available from May 25th is designed to be used by startups, business partners and ISVs. It initially comes in three single configuration sizes, the cheapest of which is $135k and only runs Linux. Hardware differences and prices are:
- Low-end – 284GB memory, 4-core, >$135k
- Midrange – 512GB memory, 6-core, >$165k
- High-end – 768GB memory, 12-core, >$275k
These are the smallest of a model range which stretch as far as 40TB memory and 190 cores. Single configurations for each Express version will shorten delivery and installation time for customers, who will have to pay extra for maintenance, operating system and other software (such as OpenShift). They may well want to take advantage of its consumption-based pricing model for z software, introduced in 2019.
These systems will run certain workloads far more cheaply than those based on x86 processors, such as those based on IBM’s own databases and transaction processing software; the one it chose to demonstrate the differences was ‘transactional core banking application running on WAS and Db2′, according to its announcement.
What does this mean?
20 years ago chip design was at the heart of the server market. Suppliers were ‘actor-managers’, building hardware/operating system/application systems and preventing their patented software from running on other processors. An end-of-term report might have read…
- IBM mainframe processors – the most mature and protected offering combined with its own operating systems and applications; widely used in financial services, government and other very large enterprises.
- RISC and Itanium chips – the most widely used; selected by each midrange server supplier and coupled with specific (usually Unix variant) operating systems; examples include Sun (now Oracle) and Fujitsu Sparc (Solaris), IBM Power (AIX, iOS). HP’s Itanium-based Integrity (HP-UX, OpenVMS) was also in this category. Despite its successful porting to each of these platforms, Windows was never sold commercially on any of these systems apart from Itanium.
- x86 chips – the cheapest, but most immature – sold by almost every server vendor and almost always running Windows. A number of software companies (especially Vmware and Microsoft) were working on introducing virtualization and other server features that would be necessary for these processors to be used in competitive midrange or large-scale systems.
Today the wide-spread use of Linux, virtual machines, containers and other open source management software has loosened the connections between supplier, chip, operating system and application allowing clever companies to run their workloads on alternative processors such as Nvidia (for GPU computing) and ARM. The most advanced server designers now include public cloud vendors such as AWS, Azure and Google, although commercial users of older server types are still legally prevented from running those workloads on alternative processors, even if they could.
IBM has been pushing the use of Linux on its servers since the late 1990s – first on its (now Lenovo’s) x86 machines, then mainframes and lastly Power machines. This extended the sale of its servers to new customers and allowed existing ones to run new and cheaper workloads – beyond the tightly-integrated proprietary ones.
IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat has shifted its center of gravity away from its processors towards software-defined platforms based on OpenShift management – from hardware focus to software focus, if you like. Other vendors are loosening up also – Intel is prepared to make chips for other suppliers such as IBM for instance.
While its LinuxOne III machines offer a new low-end for mainframe usage and will appeal to those (such as public cloud providers) who can reap the workload cost benefits of z processors, I see it as part of these same extension policy IBM has been running since the late 1990s. The real news would be if it allowed its transaction processing software to be run on non-z processors, which is not beyond the bounds of all possibility given the changes IBM has planned for 2021.