IBM Announces IBM LinuxONE 4 Express for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
IBM has introduced IBM LinuxONE 4 Express, which brings the latest performance, security, and AI capabilities of LinuxONE to small and medium-sized businesses and new data center environments. This pre-configured rack mount system aims to provide cost savings and eliminate guesswork for clients when quickly deploying workloads and getting started with the platform for various use cases, including digital assets, medical imaging with AI, and workload consolidation.
Building an Integrated Hybrid Cloud Strategy
As businesses rapidly transition their products and services online, they often end up with a hybrid cloud environment that lacks alignment and hinders the introduction of AI. According to a recent IBM survey, many executives struggle with eliminating siloed operations and adopting a multicloud platform due to an inadequate operating model. To address these challenges, organizations can carefully determine which workloads should be on-premises or in the cloud. IBM LinuxONE 4 Express offers startups and small to medium-sized businesses the opportunity to build a deliberate hybrid cloud strategy from scratch, combining the power of hybrid cloud and AI in a user-friendly format that fits into various data centers. As businesses grow, LinuxONE 4 Express can scale to meet increasing workload and performance requirements, while also supporting AI inferencing alongside critical data for expanding AI use cases.
Accelerating Computing Research for Bio Sciences
University College London, a renowned public research institution, has partnered with IBM to develop a sustainable hybrid cloud platform to support academic research. LinuxONE 4 Express is expected to facilitate high I/O workloads in biosciences, such as Next Generation Sequencing, as well as AI workloads on medical data in "Trusted Research Environments" (TREs). The system's performance, scalability, and affordability make it suitable for crucial research needs, benefiting both university research and industry players.
Delivering Scalability, Availability, and Security
IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 4, launched in April 2023, is based on the IBM Telum processor and offers energy efficiency, space reduction, and the necessary scale, performance, and security for clients. LinuxONE 4 Express, also built on the Telum processor and delivered in a rack mount format, provides high availability for clients with strict resiliency requirements. With GDPS, IBM DS8000 series storage with HyperSwap, and a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform environment, LinuxONE 4 Express systems are designed to deliver 99.999999% availability. This makes IBM LinuxONE a foundational component of IBM's infrastructure story, capable of handling mission-critical workloads with high availability and strong cybersecurity.
New Use Cases Addressed by LinuxONE 4 Express
LinuxONE 4 Express caters to a range of use cases faced by startups and small businesses:
- Digital assets: LinuxONE 4 Express provides a secure platform with confidential computing capabilities to protect sensitive data, such as digital assets. It offers scalable isolation for individual workloads, safeguarding against external attacks and insider threats.
- Medical imaging with AI: The system's AI inferencing capabilities enable clients to co-locate AI with mission-critical data, allowing for data analysis where it is stored. For example, health insurance companies can analyze large volumes of medical records in near real time to expedite claims processing.
- Workload consolidation: LinuxONE 4 Express simplifies IT environments and reduces costs by consolidating databases onto a LinuxONE system. Clients can save over 52% on their total cost of ownership over 5 years by migrating Linux workloads from x86 servers to LinuxONE 4 Express.
Activating the IBM Ecosystem for Client Success
IBM collaborates with various partners, including AquaSecurity, Clari5, Exponential AI, Opollo Technologies, Pennant, and Spiking, to provide solutions for sustainability and cybersecurity challenges. An optimized sustainability and security posture is crucial for clients running data serving, core banking, and digital assets workloads. IBM Business Partners can access resources to install, deploy, service, and resell IBM LinuxONE 4 Express.
According to Eyad Alhabbash, Director of IBM Systems Solutions & Support Group at Saudi Business Machines (SBM), the IBM LinuxONE III Express has received positive feedback from strategic customers. It demonstrated better performance than x86 servers running the same workload and was praised for its user-friendly management and operations.
The new IBM LinuxONE 4 Express will be available from IBM and certified business partners starting at $135,000 on February 20, 2024. To learn more about industry trends and gain behind-the-scenes access to the system, join the live webinar on February 20 at 11 am ET.
