With the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Conanical now offers the same great Ubuntu experience on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE servers as x86 and OpenPower platforms.
The ancient African word Ubuntu, pronounced OŎ'BOŎNTOŎ, means both “humanity to others” and “I am what I am because of who we all are”. The Ubuntu Linux distribution provided by Conanical, aims to foster this community-centric philosophy in the world of computing. Unlike most other commercial Linux distributions that came before it, Ubuntu chose not to fork into commercial and community versions. Ubuntu has a new interim release every six months and every fourth release is LTS. LTS stands for Long Term Support, which is five years for Ubuntu Server. Hardware enablement updates bring forward certain updates from the interim releases into the actively supported LTS releases. Traditionally, releases have been made public in either the fourth or tenth month of a calendar, April and October. This makes identifying the “birth date” of a release quite simple.
With the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Conanical now offers the same great Ubuntu experience on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE servers as x86 and OpenPower platforms. Ubuntu is the platform of choice for new cloud-native applications from modern development teams. It dominates public cloud guest volume and production OpenStack deployments with up to 70% market share. Many global enterprises run Ubuntu at scale in the cloud.
Running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on LinuxONE and IBM Z provides an ideal platform for your developers, who already use Ubuntu for IoT applications and other modern workloads, as it provides the same operating system and tools on the backend as they are using on the edge. Developers also have the advantage of Juju for advanced service modelling and deployment of their clouds.
Many people have asked how different is Ubuntu than other alternitves. Fundamentally, it is geared for cloud speed and innovation:
“The leading cloud-based operations and the most advanced robotics run largely on Ubuntu, and this new release is the basis for the next wave of their innovation,” said Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical. “We are proud to serve the needs of the enterprise, and research, and millions of personal and non-profit users, with one single shared free software platform.”
“As more enterprises adopt hybrid cloud, they are looking for new platforms that run Linux with efficiency and flexibility,” said Ross A. Mauri, general manager, IBM Z Systems and LinuxONE. “With the release of Ubuntu 16.04, IBM will be able to offer our LinuxONE clients a simple, affordable high-performance Linux distribution that will better equip them to take advantage of hybrid cloud.”
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for IBM LinuxONE and IBM Z is priced by the drawer, covering unlimited usage of Ubuntu on any or all of the IFLs within that drawer, 24×7 Ubuntu Advantage Advanced support services and regular security and reliability fixes from Canonical. To deliver the operating system of choice for cloud computing to the mainframe community at a game-changing flat fee, enables operators to drive down the average cost per instance.
Vicom Infinity is well versed in Ubuntu and we welcome the opportunity to work with you to successfully implement Ubuntu on your IBM Z.