Enterprise Linux for all architectures: Bringing Red Hat Enterprise Linux to IBM z15 and LinuxONE III single frame systems

If there’s one constant that can be relied upon, it’s that no two organizations will have the same needs or requirements. This is why Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports a broad ecosystem of hardware solutions and public cloud infrastructure, making the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform accessible no matter what your organization’s unique needs may be.

Today, we’re pleased to continue to extend our commitment to customer choice in underlying compute architectures with RHEL support for IBM z15 and LinuxONE III single frame solutions. Building upon the features of z15 and LinuxONE III multiframe solutions, these new air-cooled platforms extend the benefits of IBM’s hardware technologies to a broader user base while continuing to offer supported configurations to enterprises seeking to use RHEL on these new platforms.

A foundation for cloud-native on the mainframe

With RHEL as the foundation for enterprise computing on single frame IBM z15 and LinuxONE III platforms, organizations will also be able to take advantage of the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform: Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat OpenShift on z15 and LinuxONE III brings cloud-native infrastructure and developer tools to IBM’s hardware platforms, making it easier to pair traditional bare-metal workloads with next-generation, containerized applications. These benefits apply across single frame and multiframe z15 and LinuxONE III deployments, providing an on-ramp to the hybrid cloud no matter which set of IBM technologies an organization deploys.

Bringing DevOps to the IBM Z/LinuxONE portfolio

Single frame z15 can also take advantage of IT automation and DevOps best practices with Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z. This helps to eliminate the walls erected between traditional, business-critical applications that exist in the datacenter and cloud-native workloads that run across the hybrid cloud. With Ansible, applications running on IBM Z as well as those running on other platforms or infrastructure can be automated from a central place, helping to make enterprise IT more efficient and responsive while mitigating the challenges of maintaining complex enterprise IT environments.

A basis for more secure computing

As the backbone for Red Hat’s entire hybrid cloud portfolio, RHEL takes community-driven innovation and distills it into a hardened, product-ready operating system, designed to be “secure by default.” This commitment to security extends through Red Hat OpenShift, which wraps individual containers in an SELinux Policy that delivers complete isolation from other workloads and limits interactions with the host system, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.

This feature continues to work across single frame and multiframe IBM z15 and LinuxONE III systems, which offer an additional layer of security in the form of Secure Execution. Secure Execution embeds security mechanisms in the hardware itself, building additional secure enclaves that can scale to host enterprise workloads. In conjunction with RHEL and Red Hat OpenShift, Secure Execution on IBM Z and LinuxONE systems brings additional security functionality to bear, further extending the umbrella of secure computing.

We’re pleased to continue to enable customer choice by making RHEL available across a broad set of technologies, from all major public cloud services to these latest hardware advances from IBM. To learn more about supported deployment options for RHEL, please visit https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux#compatibility.

Stefanie Chiras is vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit, Red Hat.