LinuxONE 4 Express: How IBM's budget mainframe could be right for you
When you think of mainframes, you may recall those days of hulking machines with blinking lights and 9-track tape drives spinning. How things have changed. These days, Big Blue's latest IBM LinuxONE 4 Express, a pre-configured rack mount system, would pass without remark in most small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).
The IBM LinuxONE 4 Express, the newest member of the Rockhopper mainframe family, comes with up to a maximum of 16 Integrated Facility for Linux (IFLs). These Linux-only system boards are powered by a 4.6GHz IBM 8-core Telum processor. This 7nm architecture chip can support as much as 864GB of memory. Storage? It's a rack mount, so you can add pretty much any storage you like.
The Telum chip also includes an AI coprocessor. The goal is to enable you to use AI to deal with transactions in close to real-time. For example, IBM claims you can use the Telum chip to catch financial transaction fraud before it can be processed. Color me impressed.
The new mainframe is also designed -- when used with IBM's GDPS software and DS8000 series storage with HyperSwap -- to deliver 99.999999% (eight 9s) availability when running Red Hat's be-spoke Kubernetes OpenShift Container Platform.
