IBM Expands Support for Linux on Power Systems Servers

Unveils Two New Power Systems Linux Centers, Announces Plans to Extend KVM Support to Power Portfolio

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Jun 11, 2013, 06:00 ET

ARMONK, N.Y., June 11, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- At the Red Hat Summit in Boston, IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced new initiatives to further support and speed up the adoption of the Linux operating system across the enterprise. These include two new Power Systems Linux Centers and plans to extend support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology to its Power Systems portfolio of server products.

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New Power Systems Linux Centers in Austin and New York
In July, IBM will open its first North American IBM Power Systems Linux Centers -- one in Austin, Texas and the other in New York, NY. The centers will make it simpler for software developers to build and deploy new applications for big data, cloud, mobile and social business computing on open technology building blocks using Linux and the latest IBM POWER 7+ processor technology.

The new centers come on the heels of the opening of the world's first IBM's Power Systems Linux Center in May in Beijing where there is increasing demand from businesses for optimized and pre-integrated computing systems running enterprise applications on Linux. Like the Beijing center, the new center will open to clients, business partners, academics, and students. Resources include:

Linux training workshops that show developers how to program, port and optimize their applications using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server technologies on Power Systems.
Hands-on assistance from dedicated Linux and IBM systems experts to show developers how to take advantage of IBM's unique POWER7+ parallel processing and advanced virtualization capabilities.
Access to IBM's business consulting experts and business partner resources to develop joint go to market strategies for Power System and Linux based solutions.

The centers come at a time when innovative businesses are aggressively taking advantage of big data, cloud, mobile and social computing projects to capture continued growth in industries such as financial markets, banking, communications, retail and transportation. IBM plans more centers in both growth and established markets over the next several months.

KVM Support Planned for Power Systems Portfolio
IBM intends to make KVM available across its Linux-only Power servers. The KVM hypervisor is an integral part of the Linux kernel, offering an optimized virtualization technology for Linux workloads. IBM has long supported KVM on its x86-based products and plans to make it available on IBM's Linux-only Power Systems product line-up next year. As a result, clients will have greater choice when they adopt Linux-based systems to drive new workloads such as big data, cloud, mobile and social computing.

IBM has participated in a wide range of open source projects since 1999, and today this includes Open Stack, Open Daylight, Apache and Eclipse in addition to Linux. Hundreds of IBM programmers and engineers are contributing to open source as part of the collection of global open source communities, and this includes several dozen experts in China working on projects such as KVM. In November 2012, IBM opened its first KVM Center of Excellence in Beijing. The Center, also located at the IBM China System Center, promotes KVM-based solutions from IBM and its partners, and to help customers and business partners explore and adopt open virtualization and open cloud strategies. The Center was established as the first KVM Center worldwide because of the rapid adoption of virtualization and cloud computing in China. A second KVM Center of Excellence for Wall Street clients was opened in New York earlier this year.