IBM LinuxONE gets its Juju

by John Dolen on 28 January 2016

This week, via press release, IBM continued its launch of the LinuxONE family of high performance Linux systems. In August, we joined IBM with their launch of LinuxONE, announcing our intent to support the new systems starting with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release (code named Xenial Xerus). This will bring LinuxONE clients the same Ubuntu experience that they get on x86, POWER8, and other platforms. LinuxONE clients will be able to use our cloud tooling, with Juju enabling cloud solutions to be easily modelled, built, deployed, and scaled, MAAS providing bare metal provisioning, and Landscape for systems management. Prior to the general availability on 16.04, we are teaming with IBM and clients to support LinuxONE via an IBM/Canonical beta program.

So, what kinds of workloads can we expect to see with Ubuntu on LinuxONE? Firstly we can expect to see LinuxONE clients building private clouds with Ubuntu OpenStack, using many Ubuntu images within a single LinuxONE, or multiple machines. Also, given Ubuntu’s leadership in the container space, with LXD machine containers and Docker (most Docker images are built on Ubuntu), we can expect to see clients using the combination of Canonical’s container strengths with LinuxONE’s ability to massively scale containers and maintain high CPU utilisation rates, along with high security and availability. The new mobile, web and IoT applications of today, and the innovations of tomorrow demand a platform that is always available, providing instant response time. LinuxONE comes from a rich heritage of supporting some of the most demanding mission critical workloads. This makes for an ideal platform for developers, who already use Ubuntu for IoT applications and other new workloads, as it provides the same operating system and tools, including Juju, on the backend as they are using on the edge.

To hear Mark Shuttleworth’s thoughts about Ubuntu with LinuxONE, check out this video excerpt from IBM’s launch this week which appeared on wired.com.