IBM LinuxONE – beats x86 servers for environmental sustainability

The way data centers are built, populated with equipment and run is key to the world’s attempts to combat climate change. The pandemic has made more of our financial, social and work interactions digital, which can be witnessed in worldwide spending trends (my Figure above gives the trends and my forecast for the purchasing of cloud services and enterprise hardware). Spending on cloud services grew by 57% between 2019 and 2021 compared with just 4% for enterprise hardware – adding to an 18% growth for both combined.

As the number of alarming climate emergencies have grown, many governments around the world have introduced numerous climate laws[1] to reduce carbon emissions. However since these apply only at a country or regional level, enterprise companies can choose to avoid compliance by shifting data center operations (whether their own or via adopting cloud computing) to countries with less stringent legislation. Despite this possibility, the majority of large companies are taking responsibility for – and pride in – reducing their own carbon emissions continuously by year – some ultimately to zero.

LinuxONE is vastly more environmentally friendly than x86-based systems.

IBM argues that its proprietary z processors embedded in its LinuxONE server give enterprise customers significant advantages over x86 ones, allowing its customers to run their applications on more efficient, less power-hungry servers with much smaller footprints. So let’s look at how this choice of processor can help address corporate environmental ambitions. IBM’s environmental credentials of LinuxONE include:

• Modularity, scalability and flexibility
  • It is available in one to four 19” frames.
  • A single frame version takes up only a quarter of the floor space of a typical x86 server running similar workloads with the same throughput.
  • It ships them using reusable shipping crates and packaging.
• Efficiency and reliability
  • I/O processing is offloaded to specialty processors.
  • Encryption and compression are performed ‘on chip’.
  • The z processor has higher CPU utilization with significantly higher per-core performance than x86 chips.
  • It has high reliability and availability, extending the product’s lifecycle and reducing the amount of hardware needed.
• Energy monitoring and management – it includes a set of capabilities for monitoring and managing the system’s power consumption.

IBM has also published some staggering comparisons of LinuxONE verses systems built using ‘commodity’ servers for the number of processor cores needed (23 times fewer) to run a similar sized workload, which results in big savings in Operational Expenditure (Op Ex) due to the much lower amount of electricity needed to run the system. Its third generation water-cooled LinuxONE machines, launched in September 2019 also included big improvements over its second generation versions.

Linux runs on only a small proportion of branded servers

My Figure above shows the sales value of branded servers segmented by operating system. Despite the doubling of Linux part, the vast proportion of these systems are being shipped running Windows (which only runs on x86 chips).

LinuxONE – a Linux-based branded server for running advanced open source applications

There’s no question that IBM is positioning LinuxONE as a branded server choice against the (usually modular and sometimes ‘converged infrastructure’) servers from Dell EMC, HPE, Fujitsu, Huawei and others. Almost all of these systems are x86 chip (Intel or AMD) based; only a few use other chips – most notably Oracle’s Sparc and HPE’s ARM-based Moonshot systems.

Most of these competitive products are more modular than LinuxONE in the sense that they are built using multiple rack-mounted (Proliant, PowerEdge, etc.) server units, which – of course – individually are far cheaper than the $135k entry price of a LinuxONE Express system. IBM’s offering is more complete and consequentially more expensive in terms of capital expenditure (Cap Ex). Vendors of mainframe and Unix-based systems are like actor/managers in the theatre, they sell vertically-integrated servers, as opposed to the more horizontally-integrated x86 alternatives. The big difference of LinuxONE is that it is a platform built exclusively for advanced open source applications.

LinuxONE can’t run Windows, AIX or zOS, although it can run any distribution of Linux, of which SLES, Ubuntu and its own RHEL IBM officially supports. However it can support applications based on KVM and Vmware hypervisor- and/or docker container-based virtualization and its encryption, security and compression capabilities are very impressive.

LinuxONE verses self-built CSP servers

Branded servers are losing out to self-built systems. Although most Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) use some branded servers, the largest, such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, employ architects to design and contract manufacturers to build their own hyper converged systems. I don’t know if any of the largest CSPs apart from IBM Cloud currently use LinuxONE machines and (in fact) the majority of the services delivered by IBM Cloud itself are based on x86 servers.

Some customers are prejudiced against acquiring branded servers based on proprietary technology only available from a single vendor. They have more choice in swapping HPE for Dell EMC, or Intel-based for AMD-based servers for instance. Overcoming this is an ongoing challenge for IBM in selling branded servers. However IaaS cloud services are a great leveler in the sense that the hardware the CSP uses are largely irrelevant to the service purchaser. IBM could (but almost certainly won’t) sell its z processors to large CSPs to put into new kinds of self-built hyper scale systems, but it does offer its own ‘bare metal’ z services, where enterprise customers can also take its environmental advantages, paid for as an Op Ex.

An environmental lead for IBM

LinuxONE’s environmental and Op Ex advantages are world leading and will probably be even greater if/when it launches its next mainframe generation. Its importance will grow as data centers become the pivot for delivering ever-more sophisticated applications to help the world tackle climate change by becoming even more digital and replacing fossil fuel with renewable sources for electricity production.

[1] IBM estimates the total at around 2,500