Secure, scalable clouds and containers

10 May, 2018
Adam Jollans
IBM

IBM LinuxONE and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Canonical has announced their latest enterprise Linux distribution – Ubuntu 18.04 LTS – with an increased focus on both containers and multi-cloud infrastructure. Ubuntu supports both IBM LinuxONE and IBM Z, including the recently announced Rockhopper II and z14 ZR1 models.

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is a great match for LinuxONE’s enterprise server hardware, with its optimization for the advanced security technologies included in LinuxONE such as pervasive encryption and Secure Service Containers.

Canonical and IBM have been working closely together to offer cloud solutions with Ubuntu on IBM LinuxONE and IBM Z. With this announcement of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS running on IBM LinuxONE and IBM Z with pervasive encryption, customers and service providers will be able to scale up their containerized applications, manage them more easily with Kubernetes, and better protect them from external and internal attacks.

Cloud

Ubuntu Linux and associated infrastructure-as-a-service software such as OpenStack are already widely in use for building both private and public clouds.

IBM LinuxONE and Ubuntu customers include cloud service providers who are looking to stand out from the crowd by offering differentiated cloud services to their clients, such as advanced security, high availability and scalability.

These qualities of service enable hosts, systems integrators and managed service providers to build trust with their clients, protect their customer data and deliver reliable service. The IBM LinuxONE architecture also helps startups to begin small and scale exponentially without needing to re-architect their applications.

Cognition Foundry is a service provider that is running Ubuntu on LinuxONE and using it to enable startups to quickly develop secure, scalable cloud applications. In the words of Ron Argent, Founder and CEO of Cognition Foundry,

“IBM understands security and they’ve built security capability into LinuxONE. That means that it is the most secure platform in the world, which gives me confidence that I can then use that technology to offer the same secure service to my customers.”

Containers

Containers make it easy for developers and sysadmins to package applications and their dependencies in a way that they can easily be moved between different environments – for example, from development to production.

Kubernetes then adds tools for deployment, management and orchestration of containers. Kubernetes is an open source technology hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and is available in a wide range of offerings, including Ubuntu on IBM LinuxONE.

The scalability of LinuxONE makes it easy to support large number of containers. In recent internal tests, IBM was able to scale out to 330,000 Docker containers on a single LinuxONE Rockhopper II system, with no application server farms necessary.

Security

Ubuntu 18.04 supports pervasive encryption on LinuxONE and Linux on Z by exploiting the on-chip crypto hardware. This enables very fast encryption and decryption of data with minimal overhead, making it practical to encrypt all application, cloud service and database data without affecting service levels.

Ubuntu 18.04 also provides a platform for IBM Secure Service Container technology – a framework for deploying software appliances on LinuxONE and Linux on Z which, once configured, prohibits access to data and applications by rogue sysadmins and external bad actors. Secure Service Containers also provide validation of the appliance code at boot time and automatically encrypt all data.

Summary

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and IBM LinuxONE bring together security and scalability to support both clouds and containers, enabling fast application deployment and advanced data protection. Combined with the potential to lower TCO through workload consolidation, they offer the opportunity to think differently about Linux servers and accelerate digital transformation.

More information is available at www.ibm.com/linuxone and www.ubuntu.com.

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