IBM releases new entry-level LinuxONE hardware

Beijing, May 11, 2021-IBM Z is making great strides in the market. In the past year, driven by new workloads such as IBM’s confidential computing capabilities and digital asset custody, the sales of the IBM Z platform have been so exciting and exciting; 85 customers are actively planning or are implementing Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE. Scheme verification. In fact, according to a recent Forrester survey[i] sponsored by Deloitte, 74% of respondents believe that IBM Z, as an organization's strategic platform, still has long-term vitality.

For many customers, the new crown virus epidemic is also a driving factor for them to accelerate the migration of workloads to the IBM Z platform. Customers are faced with new business challenges related to changing consumer behaviors, such as violent fluctuations in financial transactions and the continuous increase in online retail transactions; therefore, they sought help from IBM Z, hoping to manage the surge in a predictable, flexible and safe manner Peak business volume. Compared with the second quarter of 2019, IBM Z customers increased the general capacity temporarily activated by nearly four times through the On/Off Capacity on Demand function in the second quarter of 2020[ii ].

But this does not mean that the IBM Z family series is only suitable for today's largest enterprises. Start-ups such as KodyPay and Ilara Health, as well as business partners including Cognition Foundry, chose LinuxONE because of its excellent security capabilities as a differentiated competitive advantage in the hybrid cloud market.

In less than a week after announcing the deployment of IBM DS8910F Storage in the IBM Z15 Model T02 rack, IBM recently released new entry-level LinuxONE hardware IBM LinuxONE III Express, as well as a new flexible pricing model for IBM Z hardware-on demand Use billing model.

Released IBM LinuxONE III Express

IBM LinuxONE III Express is a ready-to-use platform for start-ups, business partners, and ISVs. It is designed with speed improvements in mind to help customers get up and running quickly.

According to IDC's tracking/prediction report for the fourth quarter of 2020, the average price of mid-range enterprise servers in 2021 is $154,200. Among them, a single established configuration LinuxONE III Express is an economical new product designed for the most popular workloads, including data services and Red Hat OpenShift. IBM internal testing has shown that a 12-core IBM LinuxONE III LT2 Express server running the same WebSphere and Db2 workloads requires 18.7 times fewer cores than x86 servers at the same level, and the three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) is 57% lower. [iii]

LinuxONE III Express will be officially launched on May 25th, with the following features:

Three-scale configurations are suitable for most workloads and can be used as an alternative to public clouds.

Flexible expansion: only need to upgrade the microcode, it can be expanded with the development of the business in the same system.

Realize value faster: According to the established configuration and price, ensure faster delivery and installation of the server.

Confidential computing capabilities: Customers can use IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services to achieve the highest commercial level of privacy protection.

This release allows IBM to expand the scope of LinuxONE customers to more start-ups and ISVs. At the same time, IBM also released a new pricing model to help IBM Z customers minimize platform costs and improve production efficiency.

Increase flexibility in hardware pricing

Today, IBM introduced a new cloud-like hardware pricing model as a supplement, that is, an on-demand billing model that enables customers to quickly respond to changes in dynamic workloads and business needs.

According to a recent ParkMyCloud survey, [iv] by 2021, wasted spending on the cloud is expected to reach 21 billion U.S. dollars, which is usually caused by the increasingly common "peak" workload and unexpected increases in capacity requirements.

What IBM released is a consumption model based on consumption for hardware, which helps to curb the waste of cloud expenditures, control unpredictability, improve the predictability of hardware pricing for customers, and provide ready-to-use spare capacity "channels". The "channel" adopts a usage-based charging model to meet temporary business peak demand. With the on-demand billing model, customers can now easily expand capacity to meet business needs while also solving the problem of out-of-control cloud costs.

"In response to customer needs, market changes, and new regulations, our business needs are constantly changing. IBM Z plays a key role in our operations. The surge in online banking and instant payment workloads, it enables us to Quickly expand and provide high-quality customer service. The on-demand billing model provides flexible and transparent pricing solutions to achieve the best business performance in a cloud-like manner. We only pay for the capacity used." A large European bank 'S executives said so.