IBM offers its enterprise-grade Linux platform as a service on IBM cloud

IBM has announced the general availability of LinuxONE Bare Metal Servers. This is a new way to offer IBM’s enterprise-grade Linux platform — LinuxONE — as a cloud service in an Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) model. The availability of LinuxONE servers in the IBM cloud will offer benefits like software licence savings and reduction in energy consumption, the company said in a blog.

While LinuxONE Bare Metal Servers' general availability was initially announced in September 2022, it was then accessible only via an allow list. The allow list is now removed to enable full public access.

The LinuxONE Bare Metal Servers are based on the LinuxONE processor architecture known as s390x. It is designed to serve hybrid enterprises and offers dedicated memory assignment, integration with private networking, and the ability to monitor utilisation and health through integration with Activity Tracker.

With the LinuxONE bare metal server in the list, IBM, in total offers three proprietary hardware platforms in its cloud now. This includes offering superscalar multi-core microprocessors Power8 in an as-a-service format (since 2016) and cloud-hosted virtual machines with z/OS operating system that runs IBM mainframes (since 2022).

IBM launched LinuxONE in 2015 as a Linux-only mainframe server. Companies useLinuxONE for a range of Linux-based workloads like database scalability and application modernisation especially those running on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. It offers flexible consumption options in both on-premise and off-premise environments. IBM launched LinuxONE Emperor 4 in September 2022. A highly scalable Linux and Kubernetes-based platform, Emperor 4 delivers scalability for thousands of workloads in a single system. At the time of launch, IBM highlighted its capabilities that can reduce energy consumption.