The News: IBM recently launched the LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 system and this week held a digital launch party that highlighted the characteristics of the system and how IBM is positioning the system to address the burgeoning sustainability requirements for many enterprises. See the full release from IBM here.

IBM’s LinuxONE Goes Mainstream With the Launch of the LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 System

Analyst Take: A couple of weeks ago IBM announced the launch of its latest LinuxONE system, the LinuxONE Rockhopper 4, as part of a wider launch of other systems. IBM held a LinuxONE dedicated launch event this week focused purely on the Linux-only based system.
IBM has been a long-time proponent of Linux stretching back to 1999 when IBM declared that Linux would run all of its chip architectures In 2019, IBM bought enterprise software solution provider Red Hat back for $34 billion, further demonstrating how strategic Linux is to the company’s fortunes.

This new addition to IBM’s LinuxONE family builds on the three previous generations of LinuxONE that stretch back to 2015.It is designed to support mission-critical workloads such as AI, machine learning, and hybrid cloud applications, while also providing robust security and resiliency features. The news here is that with this generation of systems, all of this functionality is being delivered in a smaller form factor.

The IBM LinuxONE platform is based on the IBM Telum processor and is specifically designed for mission-critical Linux workloads. It runs a variety of Linux operating systems including SLES, RHEL, and Ubuntu, amongst other community-supported distributions. It also includes specialized hardware and firmware to provide unique benefits not available on traditional commodity x86 and ARM servers.

The Key Advantages of the IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 4

While x86 and more recently ARM-based architecture dominate the server landscape, for those enterprises where security, performance, scalability, and availability are key, IBM”s LinuxONE has been a proven option since 2015. And with the advent of the 4th generation of LinuxONE, IBM has added sustainability to the mix as a reason to actively consider LinuxONE. Here are what I view as some of the most important features of the LinuxONE platform:

Security. One of the key advantages of the IBM LinuxONE platform is its security features. The platform is designed to provide hardware-based security and encryption for data at rest and in transit, making it a popular choice for industries such as finance, healthcare, and government. The LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 continues this tradition by including IBM Secure Execution for Linux, which isolates workloads in secure enclaves to protect them from external and internal threats by providing access only to the people who need it. These features and the overall posture of the system have led IBM to gain traction in the digital asset custody space of late, with multiple new client logos wins.

Performance. The Telum processor is a high-performance chip designed in-house by IBM for AI and data-intensive workloads. It has a frequency of 4.6 GHz, and can support up to 68 cores per system. The Telum processor also features additional compute resources for dedicated workloads such as on-chip AI processing, crypto processors that deliver protection at speed and scale, and a high-bandwidth network that can handle hundreds of workloads in a single system.

The Telum processor contains an on-chip artificial intelligence accelerator that can perform up to eight trillion operations per second (TOPS) per core. This enables fast and efficient AI inferencing for applications such as natural language processing, computer vision, fraud detection, and more. The Telum processor has dedicated cryptographic processors that encrypt data at rest, in flight, and in use with minimal overhead. The crypto processors also support quantum-safe cryptography to protect data from future threats. The Telum processor has a new memory interface that uses transparent memory encryption technology to help protect all data leaving the processor chips before it is stored in DIMMs. The memory interface also supports reduced latency access memory (RLAM) mode that can improve performance for memory-intensive workloads by reducing access time latency for frequently used data by caching it locally on-chip rather than retrieving it from memory every time it’s needed. The Telum processor supports ultra-low latency RoCE networking based on NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs.

Scalability. IBM’s LinuxONE is designed to be highly scalable, with the ability to handle massive data volumes and supports thousands of virtual machines, making it ideal for large enterprises. LinuxONE also includes advanced I/O capabilities, including support for InfiniBand and RoCE (Remote Direct Memory Access over Converged Ethernet), which enable high-speed data transfer between systems.

One key use case for LinuxONE is the ability to run huge vertical database instances on LinuxONE in logical partitions that can span multiple high-performance cores. MongoDB is one such example, rather than sharding MongoDB over multiple server instances, clients can leverage the scale-up nature of LinuxONE. This video from Martin Kennedy at Citi Bank explains how they are running a huge MongoDB database deployment on LinuxONE.

Availability. Another advantage of IBM’s LinuxONE is its resiliency features. The platform is designed to provide continuous uptime with IBM claiming 99.99999% system availability, which is way beyond most other systems that struggle to deliver on 5 9’s Resiliency: The LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 is designed to achieve up to 99.99999% availability with GDPS, IBM DS8000 series with Hyper Swap, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform environment. The server also has built-in redundancy and fault tolerance features, such as hot-swappable components, RAID-style memory DIMMS, redundant power and cooling systems dynamic partitioning, live guest relocation, and concurrent maintenance.

Sustainability. The LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 can reduce energy consumption by up to 75% compared to x86 servers with similar conditions and location. By consolidating Linux workloads on five of the larger IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 systems instead of running them on comparable x86 servers under similar conditions, organizations can reduce energy consumption by 75%, space by 50%, and their carbon dioxide equivalent footprint by over 850 metric tons annually. For more details on these bold sustainability claims, IBM has created a Sustainability calculator.

Overall, IBM’s LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 is designed to support modern workloads such as AI and machine learning. It includes hardware accelerators for these workloads, making it possible to run them at scale with high performance. Additionally, the platform is designed to support hybrid cloud applications, allowing enterprises to run workloads on-premises or in the cloud as needed. The new LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 also has a new rack mount option that removes the previous constraint where clients were forced to take a full IBM rack to house previous generations of LinuxONE.
Looking Ahead for IBM and LinuxONE

In summary, IBM’s launch of the LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 is an important milestone for IBM’s Linux server offerings. Enterprises have several choices when it comes to compute workloads. While traditional x86 servers are the most common choice, they have limitations in terms of scalability and security. Cloud computing has also become popular, allowing enterprises to rent computing resources as needed from cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. However, cloud computing has its own set of limitations, including concerns around data privacy and security.

IBM’s LinuxONE offers an alternative to both traditional x86 servers and cloud computing, providing the scalability and security needed for mission-critical workloads while also supporting modern workloads such as AI and machine learning. Additionally, LinuxONE can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, providing flexibility and control over computing resources.

When you couple this with the fact IBM’s LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 is a server that can help organizations achieve their sustainability goals by reducing their carbon footprint, I fully expect to gain significant market traction with this new system.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.