LinuxONE III Express – A highly secure, available and affordable mission critical platform in a small package

Why can’t your small and medium-sized business’ access the same computing advantages as big enterprises – the kind delivered by large, modern, “mainframe” servers?

I'm talking about:

• Security – As businesses move more data and workloads into the different flavors of cloud and adopt containerization and modernization, we need advanced approaches, like confidential computing, to keep them secure. Security breaches can result in qualitative and quantitative losses and even put companies out of business.
• Availability – Businesses planning digital transformation want data insights to speed and improve decisions and operations. Some have already transformed. But in the data-driven business, data insights become mission critical. Downtime translates to lost business. So, you need servers that deliver true enterprise-class, 24/7 availability.
• Readiness for modern workloads – Approaches like containerization can make developing and deploying applications easier. Hybrid cloud can give your business huge flexibility. But you need a server platform that makes adopting these new approaches not just possible, but easy, manageable and highly available.

Businesses know the value of enterprise computing – according to a 2020 Deloitte survey, 74% see mainframes as a valuable long-term strategic platform. So, what is stopping smaller companies from choosing them?

We might expect answer is the cost. Today, “mainframe” servers are used by almost 90% of the world’s top 50 banks, healthcare organizations and government agencies. All of the top 10 insurers use them too. But smaller businesses, on the other hand, assume they cannot afford them.
Another reason is complexity. If you run a smaller business, your IT team is likely to include just a few professionals. So, you may not have the time, or the in-house skills to run and manage a complex system.

But thankfully, things have changed.

A few years ago, IBM introduced LinuxONE, a more accessible enterprise server designed to enable hybrid cloud and run any Linux workload you can think of. LinuxONE inherits the classic strengths of the mainframe platform, and delivers the same quality of service at a fraction of the cost.

Now, with LinuxONE III Express, there are solutions specifically designed for growing businesses. Let’s take a look at them.

LinuxONE III: The Express-way to enterprise computing

The new IBM LinuxONE III Express is a best-in-class Linux Server that is priced especially for smaller businesses, software developers, and even startups. The solution maximizes accessibility in three ways:

1. It’s priced very affordably – please ask me or your GBM contact for details
2. It can help you consolidate workloads, reducing your hardware needs – IBM tests show a 12-core IBM
3. LinuxONE III Express server requires 18.7 times fewer cores to run Db2 workloads, compared to x86 servers
4. TCO is up to 57% lower than x86 alternatives, according to an IBM internal study

LinuxONE III Express was also created with speed and simplicity in mind.

What makes it fast and simple? It’s an off-the-shelf solution with everything you need to run the workloads that power digital transformation. Because it’s an off-the-shelf solution, with three flexible size options to match your needs, it deploys and installs quickly. And because IBM designed LinuxONE especially for businesses like yours, you can use the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes platform, as well as IBM Cloud Paks, to adopt new technologies with ease. Hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, AI, containers, cloud-native applications and more are at your fingertips.

Big enterprise advantages

Earlier I talked about the advantages that IBM mission critical servers give to large enterprises – but which smaller businesses usually can’t access.

LinuxONE III Express is a great answer to that, in a compact and affordable package. It provides exceptional performance and workload capability, as detailed above. And it offers the renowned reliability and availability of other IBM enterprise platforms – there’s almost nothing better.

And on the security front, LinuxONE III Express is at the leading edge. It has confidential computing capabilities, with the ability to encrypt data at rest and in flight, as well as during processing in the cloud with IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services. It supports role-based access control based on policies you can define. All of this helps to keep your business and customers protected as you move more data and applications to cloud.

Is LinuxONE III Express right for your business?

LinuxONE III Express is really a solution designed to remove the technology barriers from business growth. It’s affordable, flexible, and can give you an advantage in terms of reliability, security, and performance. And with its pre-configured design and pre-built Cloud Pak solutions for key workloads, it can help to speed your digital transformation.

If you'd like to know more, discuss your infrastructure needs, and get some advice on the right solution, please get in touch.