By Rich Ptak
In 2013, IBM announced its
$1B investment in Linux, fueling new ideas and solutions in the process. Most of the investment has been on the POWER
architecture and is beginning to pay off in multiple areas, with new solution
vendors looking to take advantage of chip and memory advancements.
POWER8, the latest payoff,
demonstrates IBM’s commitment to drive significant change in the Linux market. An
interesting investment, but why would an IT architect or developer care? As an
IT professional involved with Linux, IBM’s investment and resulting fallout can
make your job easier as well as potentially directly benefit your career.
We think POWER8’s open
hardware, the only architecture open to the market, will repeat the commercial success
of the open software model. Open software revolutionized the software business.
For hardware, it is already inspiring creativity as it drives ISVs, integrators
and enterprises to work on the POWER8 Linux platform. This increases platform
choice for customers and provides more opportunities for developers for the platform.
Our series of blogs will discuss more of
the opportunities we see from IBM’s investments, what they may look like and
how to take advantage of them.
Also growing from the
investment is a steady build-up of Linux expertise at IBM’s client and partner
support centers worldwide[1]. The more than 1200 ISV applications currently
available on POWER8 can be partially attributed to these centers. These centers
also offer free help for such activities as migrating apps[2] (e.g. between Intel and
Power Systems) thus reducing risks, facilitating cross platform communication, code
conversions and/or code development for POWER8 Linux. In addition, IBM has developer cloud support for free
access[3] to Linux on POWER8
platforms. IBM’s BlueMix Cloud can also be used to assist Power8 Linux
development.
The OpenPOWER
foundation[4] is another major expansion
of IBM support for POWER8/Linux. Created by IBM, Google[5], Mellanox, NVIDIA and Tyan,
the Foundation allows member companies to leverage POWER technology and
architecture to develop products. Rapid growth to ninety members (Samsung,
Rackspace, Hitachi, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, etc.) and academic
associates (Rice University, Oregon State University, etc.) adds to the
momentum.
Foundation
member efforts have already successfully brought a number of products to market.
For example, Redis Labs, Altera, Canonical, and IBM collaborated to produce the
IBM Data engine for NoSQL. NVIDIA and IBM cooperated to produce the IBM POWER
S824L server with GPU acceleration. Both were announced last October. You can
expect more product announcements in coming months.
We
believe that these are among the most significant developments to date in the
Linux world. Future blogs will explore further details of POWER8 technology and
services. We’ll discuss what it means to
developers/users in more detail as well as discuss benefits to architects,
developers and other users.
[1]
IBM Client Centers see: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/services/clientcenters/index.html; IBM Innovation Centers see: http://ibm.com/partnerworld/iic; POWER
Development Platform see: http://ibm.com/partnerworld/pdp
[2]
Note that Linux on RHEL (in beta), SUSE and Ubuntu are all supporting little
endian on Power
[4]
More information about OpenPOWER at: http://openpowerfoundation.org/
for a discussion of the exciting projects underway.
[5]
Google demonstrates its motherboard with a POWER8 processor: http://www.cnet.com/news/google-acquires-a-taste-for-ibms-power8-processors/
Main Frames Main Frames Training "
ReplyDeleteMain Frames Online Training
Send ur Enquiry to contact@21cssindia.com
Introduction to the Mainframe Concepts
Introduction to IBM Mainframe Systems
IBM Mainframe Architecture
Data and Job Management" more… Online Training- Corporate Training- IT Support U Can Reach Us On +917386622889 - +919000444287 http://www.21cssindia.com/courses/main-frames-online-training-107.html