The News: IBM recently launched the 4th generation of its LinuxONE servers and took the opportunity to further demonstrate its commitment to sustainability during the recent Open Mainframe Summit event by announcing a code donation to the community of a sustainability dashboard.
IBM Continues to Demonstrate Commitment to Sustainability at Open Mainframe Summit Event
Analyst Take: IBM’s continued demonstration of its commitment to sustainability was in evidence at the recent Open Mainframe Summit event where the company’s donation of a sustainability dashboard was announced.
In the keynote, IBM showed screenshots of a sustainability demo that involved 256 cores on x86 running MongoDB and moved them to a LinuxONE Emperor 4 running 19 Linux cores. The demo relied on the following stack to monitor the results:
- Instana was used to visualize the infrastructure and check the workload
- Grafana was used to monitor the environmental data
- Turbonomic was used to optimize the environment
- Envizi was used to monitor the overall environmental, social and governance indicators of the datacenter
The demonstrated outcomes were:
- Greenhouse gas emissions were reduced
- Electricity consumption was reduced
- Response time and error rate improved
The sustainability Grafana dashboard that IBM has donated as open source is used to visualize sustainability metrics for workload migration from x86 to LinuxONE and now, customers can contribute to it, or use it to track their performance and savings. Without the template, customers would need to fetch the data from several data sources and put them into a single dashboard to visualize the sustainability-related metrics including app performance, environmental metrics, info monitoring metrics and calculate the energy savings by themselves.
IBM with LinuxONE is looking to drive the narrative around sustainability and how through radical consolidation of Linux workloads onto a smaller number of compute cores, customers can reduce carbon emissions and deliver against board-level mandated ESG pledges. Positioning LinuxONE as a server designed to address the challenges in making actionable steps toward ESG pledges is a wise and timely move by IBM and will position LinuxONE to new buyers and open up new opportunities for IBM as it looks to move beyond its traditional installed base.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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Image Credit: IBM
Author Information
Regarded as a luminary at the intersection of technology and business transformation, Steven Dickens is the Vice President and Practice Leader for Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure, and Operations at The Futurum Group. With a distinguished track record as a Forbes contributor and a ranking among the Top 10 Analysts by ARInsights, Steven's unique vantage point enables him to chart the nexus between emergent technologies and disruptive innovation, offering unparalleled insights for global enterprises.
Steven's expertise spans a broad spectrum of technologies that drive modern enterprises. Notable among these are open source, hybrid cloud, mission-critical infrastructure, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and FinTech innovation. His work is foundational in aligning the strategic imperatives of C-suite executives with the practical needs of end users and technology practitioners, serving as a catalyst for optimizing the return on technology investments.
Over the years, Steven has been an integral part of industry behemoths including Broadcom, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and IBM. His exceptional ability to pioneer multi-hundred-million-dollar products and to lead global sales teams with revenues in the same echelon has consistently demonstrated his capability for high-impact leadership.
Steven serves as a thought leader in various technology consortiums. He was a founding board member and former Chairperson of the Open Mainframe Project, under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. His role as a Board Advisor continues to shape the advocacy for open source implementations of mainframe technologies.
