IBM and Red Hat: Nearly two decades of Linux innovation across computing architectures

In the decades since its inception, Linux has become synonymous with collaboration, both at a technical and organizational standpoint. This community work, from independent contributors, end users and IT vendors, has helped Linux adapt and embrace change, rather than fight it. A powerful example of this collaboration was the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 2.1 in 2002, heralding the march of Linux across the enterprise world. Today, Red Hat Enterprise is a bellwether for Linux in production systems, serving as the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to power organizations across the world and across the open hybrid cloud.

All of this innovation and industry leadership wouldn’t have been possible without a strong partner ecosystem, including the close ties we’ve long had with IBM. IBM was one of the first major technology players to recognize the value in Linux, especially RHEL. As IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE celebrate 20 years of powering enterprise IT today, this benchmark provides further validation of the need for enterprise-grade Linux across architectures, especially as the requirements of modern businesses change dynamically.

One Linux platform, spanning the mainframe to the open hybrid cloud

For more than five years, Red Hat’s vision of IT’s future rests in the hybrid cloud, where operations and services don’t fully reside in a corporate datacenter or in a public cloud environment. While the open hybrid cloud provides a myriad of benefits, from greater control over resources to extended flexibility and scalability, it also delivers choice: choice of architecture, choice of cloud provider and choice of workload.

RHEL encompasses a vast selection of certified hardware configurations and environments, including IBM Z and LinuxONE - this ecosystem recently expanded to include IBM z15 and LinuxONE III single frame systems. Working with IBM as a long-time partner, we’ve optimized RHEL across nearly all computing architectures, from mainframes and Power systems to x86 and Arm processors. It’s this ability to deliver choice that makes RHEL an ideal backbone for the hybrid cloud.

Linux is just the beginning

Linux is crucial to the success of the hybrid cloud, but it’s just the first step. RHEL lays the foundation for organizations to extend their operations into new environments, like public cloud, or new technologies, like Kubernetes. Choice remains key throughout this evolution, as innovation is worth nothing if it cannot answer the specific and evolving needs of individual enterprises.

RHEL is the starting point for Red Hat’s open innovation, including Red Hat OpenShift. Again, thanks to our close collaboration with IBM, the value of RHEL, OpenShift and Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies encompasses IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. This makes it easier for organizations to use their existing investments in IBM’s powerful, scalable mainframe technologies while still taking advantage of cloud-native technologies.

Supporting IT choice and supporting IT’s future

The open hybrid cloud isn’t a set of technologies delivered in a box - rather, it’s an organizational strategy that brings the power and flexibility of new infrastructure and emerging technologies to wherever the best footprint is for a given enteprise’s needs. IBM Z and LinuxONE represent a powerful architecture for organizations to build out modern, forward-looking datacenter implementations, while RHEL provides the common plane to unite these advanced systems with the next wave of open source innovations, including Red Hat OpenShift.

We’re pleased to celebrate this milestone with IBM’s Z and LinuxONE teams, and we look forward to continuing to power customer deployments across the hybrid cloud in the decades to come!