Powering the hybrid cloud on next-generation hardware: Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System Z and LinuxONE

For more than five years we have been driving our technology strategy around the idea that the future of enterprise IT does not reside solely in an enterprise datacenter or in the public cloud. Instead the next wave of computing is built on a blend of these technologies and infrastructure: in short, the future is hybrid. The value of hybrid clouds comes from the choice it delivers, pairing the control of the corporate datacenter alongside the scale and flexibility of public clouds. We strongly feel, however, that the most valuable hybrid clouds are those that offer not only a choice of deployment type and location, but also a choice of the underlying architecture and the capacity to run on multiple public clouds.

With so many varied systems and infrastructures powering traditional and modern workloads, choice combined with consistency of operations becomes key. It’s this consistency that the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, is designed to deliver, regardless of hardware, virtual environment or cloud provider. Today, we’re pleased to continue our efforts to drive a more consistent foundation for hybrid computing with support for IBM z15 and LinuxONE III, the latest hardware offerings from IBM built to support cloud-native and traditional operations alike.

The z15 and LinuxONE III enterprise platforms build upon the core tenets of flexibility, enhanced security and performance, tenets that are also key building blocks of RHEL.

• Flexibility for hybrid cloud computing: Features like Application Streams, which separates necessary developer packages from the foundation of the operating system, drive enhanced stability for production applications. Full support for buildah, podman and skopeo to create, start and share containerized applications enables enterprise IT organizations to build for and run the future of their business across the hybrid cloud all while maintaining traditional production workloads.

• Enhanced security for mission-critical workloads: RHEL 8 is built to be “secure by default,” with layered security and granular policy controls in place at every layer of the operating system, including SELinux and support for the latest cryptography advancements. Additionally, RHEL deployments are backed by Red Hat’s extensive technical expertise and our Product Security Team, which provides errata, patches and security guidance in an ever-changing threat landscape.

• Powering the future through performance and reliability: RHEL is trusted around the world by organizations that simply cannot afford downtime, from financial markets and banks to healthcare providers and governments. Through close engineering collaboration with our robust partner ecosystem, including IBM, we’re able to provide a platform optimized for nearly every environment, hardware configuration and deployment scenario, providing a solid foundation for every critical workload.

With RHEL available on z15 and LinuxONE III, this helps pave the way for the rest of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift, to emerge on IBM enterprise platforms. We’re pleased to continue our work with IBM in bringing the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to their next-generation systems.

Stefanie Chiras is vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit at Red Hat.