IBM Z Solutions Consultant
IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 Announcement: Sustainability, Scalability, Security and Superior Performance
Sustainability. In an IBM nationwide survey, 85% of the CEOs stated their companies have a sustainability strategy, but as few as 35% are acting on it. IBM’s new LinuxONE Emperor 4, announced September 13th, 2022, focuses on attaining sustainability goals along with providing a robust secure server that achieves high scalability for a company’s growing workloads.
Why else would an enterprise look at this new LinuxONE server? Besides the benefits offered to the enterprise’s sustainability, security and scalability goals, this server offers availability of seven 9s, has one of the fastest chip in the industry, 5.2GHz, and boasts of 32 MB level 2 caches, which no other server challenges. The IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 is ready to support today’s applications.
IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 at a Glance
The LinuxONE Emperor 4 is the fourth generation of LinuxONE servers, dating back to 2015. This server is an enterprise-sized server, scaling to 200 cores. The machine number, 3931-LA1, has 5 models:
- Max39 – single drawer system
- Max82 – two-drawer
- Max125 – three-drawer
- Max168 – four-drawer
- Max200 – four-drawer
As in prior IBM Z servers, the server sits in a 19” rack that expands from one to four racks. A potential for twelve I/O drawers can reside across these four racks. The racks housing the processor drawers will include a radiator as the cooling element. The Telum processor chip was unveiled August 23, 2021, at the HotChips conference. RAIM memory, Redundant Array of Independent memory, caps off at 40 TB, 10 TB in each drawer. This box is so fast and charged with such high capacity, IBM claims a single box can handle all of Black Monday’s transactions!
Telum Chip
The Telum chip first became available on the IBM z16 server, announced April 5th, earlier this year. This revolutionary chip design is targeted for AI inferencing. To take advantage of the Telum PU, IBM redesigned the chip. On a single chip are the eight cores, high-speed caches, that is 128K level 1 and 32 MB Level 2 caches for each core, the data paths to move data quickly, cryptographic hardware plus the co-processors for AI inferencing, data compression and sort.
Now, when an application’s transaction is executed, the transfer from the traditional application to the deep learning analytics, such as fraud detection, occurs on the same chip to the AIU co-processor. Data doesn’t leave the chip. For this reason, IBM claims that companies’ fraud detection models can be run on 100% of their transactions and still meet their SLA. This feature is called the IBM Z Integrated Accelerator for AI.
An extensive ecosystem of AI products is available today that transparently utilizes the Integrated Accelerator for AI. Open Source tools such as Keras, PyTorch and TensorFlow run on LinuxONE Emperor 4. Onnx is available to port models between products and servers. The magnitude of capacity, newly engineered Telum chip and processing speeds enabled by the redesigned chip makes the LinuxONE Emperor 4 the best server for today’s AI-infused applications.
Hybrid Cloud Partner of the Year
On day of announcement, IBM touted its proud award they received at this year’s MongoDB World 2022: “Hybrid Cloud Partner of the Year”. This recognition stems from a massive internal MongoDB-as-a-Service cloud running on LinuxONE servers at Citi Bank. Martin Kennedy, Citi Bank’s Mainframe Services Manager, spoke of the value of the LinuxONE in enabling their development departments to spin-up MongoDB databases in an instant. LinuxONE Emperor 4 continues to expand support for the industry’s leading open source products.
Quantum Safe
What does Quantum Safe mean? Quantum Safe are new algorithms used when protecting keys and digital signatures. The quantum safe algorithms are different from today’s algorithms. These new algorithms are needed to protect data once quantum computers are commercially available. Quantum computers are expected to break current encryption algorithms easily, so planning has begun today for quantum computers’ projected availability by the end of this decade. Though this seem far into the future, the security industry is preparing for the shift to these new algorithms today. NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology, chose three IBM algorithms to pursue as quantum-safe algorithms for their 2024 standards publication. In the meantime, IBM supplied these algorithms for testing in the LinuxONE Emperor 4 crypto libraries. In addition, IBM offers a mechanism to inventory current crypto algorithms usage, helping companies plan their transition to a quantum-safe future.
Sustainability
Five years ago, companies’ key focus was on server sprawl cost containment. This led to the focus on consolidations and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) studies. The LinuxONE server still boasts of an average consolidation of fifteen x86 server cores to one LinuxONE Emperor 4 core. But today, the server sprawl has led to other challenges: high energy consumption and costs along with data center expansions in an effort to house the growing number of servers. With the LinuxONE Emperor 4, sustainability goals can be met immediately by x86 server consolidations onto the LinuxONE Emperor 4 server. Companies can reap a 75% savings in energy efficient costs and 50% in reducing their carbon footprint. This is a simple solution to advancing most companies’ sustainability goals.
Summary
This blog is a quick introduction to the IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4 server. As more open source Java or .Net applications port easily to a LinuxONE server, the LinuxONE’s value is expected to explode for the IT businesses.
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