Frank Heimes
on 13 September 2022
IBM has today announced the next generation of its enterprise-grade Linux server family, IBM LinuxONE. The LinuxONE Emperor 4 is IBM’s most highly performing, secure, sustainable and open Linux server to date.
As the world’s most powerful Linux-based server, LinuxONE Emperor 4 matches perfectly with Ubuntu, the leading Linux operating system. The latest Ubuntu Server release combines Canonical’s signature stability and price-performance together with purpose built LinuxONE hardware support – providing users with an unparalleled path to value for the new IBM server.
Powering sustainable Linux data centres
In the face of the global climate crisis, minimising data centre carbon footprint is a key priority for all responsible businesses. At the same time, with the COVID-19 pandemic leading to fewer people in offices and data centres, servers must be more robust than ever to ensure high availability.
IBM LinuxONE systems have always excelled in sustainability and reliability, and the new generation builds on these strengths even further by delivering significant performance improvements without increasing energy consumption.
Compared to the previous generation LinuxONE III LT1, the new LinuxONE Emperor 4 offers:
- 50% more cache
- 9% increased per-core performance
- 17% higher total system capacity
- 25% more processor capacity per drawer
For businesses not already using IBM LinuxONE servers, consolidating common server workloads onto LinuxONE Emperor 4 can reduce energy consumption by 75% and data centre floor space by 50%.
These performance and sustainability improvements have been achieved without compromising LinuxONE’s industry-leading security, scalability, and ease of maintenance, making LinuxONE Emperor 4 an ideal choice for mission-critical Linux workloads of all sizes.
Scalability is especially crucial for optimising resource utilisation and energy consumption. With LinuxONE Emperor 4, users can seamlessly scale up, scale out, flex capacity on demand, and reallocate resources to align with evolving priorities. Capacity can be increased with minimal energy impact by simply turning on unused cores.
Utilising new capabilities
Earlier this year, IBM z16 launched with an array of powerful new features, including quantum cryptography and AI inferencing. LinuxONE Emperor 4 brings these capabilities to the LinuxONE server family, enabling users to secure their infrastructure against potential future threats, benefit from real-time AI-driven insights, and more.
Taking advantage of these new hardware features requires operating system support, which is where Ubuntu comes in. Building on the long-standing partnership between IBM and Canonical, Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS was designed in parallel with IBM z16 to support the new features.
And today the new LinuxONE Emperor 4 system can make immediate use of this support, too.
Since then, Canonical has worked to continuously improve IBM hardware support across cryptography, compression, networking, AI, and machine, systems, and container management. As a result, the recently released Ubuntu 22.04.1 update provides out-of-the box support for the full scope of LinuxONE Emperor 4 capabilities, ensuring that users can make the most of the next generation IBM platform from day one.
Ubuntu Server 22.04.1 LTS can be flexibly installed in a LinuxONE Emperor 4 LPAR (classic or DPM systems), as an IBM z/VM guest, as a KVM virtual machine, and in different container environments such as LXD, Docker or Kubernetes.
Ubuntu further complements LinuxONE by giving easy users access to a vast library of open source applications and solutions. What’s more, server functionality can be augmented with products and services from the IBM Hyper Protect family of offerings in the IBM Cloud.
Cost-effective support
Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure is Canonical’s comprehensive enterprise support subscription. Whereas most vendors price support entirely on a per-core basis, Canonical offers a per-drawer model. Given that LinuxONE Emperor 4 includes up to 200 customer cores, the per-drawer pricing approach with Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure represents a uniquely cost-effective support option.
For existing LinuxONE and Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure customers, the support subscription remains the same when adopting LinuxONE Emperor 4, so joint customers can keep their data centres secure and highly available without extra hassle or excessive licence fees.
Ubuntu Server 22.04.1 LTS and LinuxONE Emperor 4
Pairing Ubuntu with the new generation of IBM LinuxONE servers represents an ideal system for not only today’s IT, but also for the future.
To learn more about LinuxONE Emperor 4 visit ibm.com/products/linuxone-emperor-4.
Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS is available now. Download it here.
