IBM Corp. today announced a massive expansion of its on-premises enterprise infrastructure lineup, with new single-frame and rack-mount versions of its iconic z17 mainframes and more compact LinuxONE 5 server platforms.

The new lineup includes the IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 and IBM LinuxONE 5 Express systems, which are the first to be offered in more flexible form factors at a lower price point. Meanwhile, the smaller z17 systems, which have been reduced to a standard 19-inch rack-mountable size, are part of an effort to democratize access to the venerable mainframe so that smaller organizations can take advantage of its high-performance processing and industrial-grade security.

IBM Chief Product Officer Tina Tarquinio introduced the new mainframes in a blog post, saying that they’re designed to address a couple of converging headaches for enterprises of all sizes: the need to run sensitive, data-intensive artificial intelligence workloads on-premises to adhere to strict regulatory requirements, and the pressure to reduce their energy costs and data center footprints.

Tarquinio said the company has solved these challenges with some impressive hardware engineering feats. For instance, the new single-frame and rack-mount z17 systems squeeze massive amounts of computing power into a smaller physical space. They can support up to 82 cores and provide a hefty 18 terabytes of memory across just two processor drawers. They’re powered by IBM’s most advanced Telum II processor, which delivers a 10% single-threaded improvement and up to 20% greater capacity overall than the older z16 mainframe systems.

Similar gains have been made with the new LinuxONE systems for Linux computing environments. IBM Fellow Marcel Mitrain said in a separate blog post that the LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 platform can perform the workload as 23 similarly sized x86 servers. They’re geared toward transaction processing and AI workloads, and can reduce power consumption by up to 83% compared to standard servers. When running AI-infused online transaction processing or OLTP workloads on Red Hat OpenShift, the new systems can do the same amount of work as a standard x86 setup with four times fewer cores.

As for LinuxONE 5 Express, this is a preconfigured and low-priced entry point for smaller enterprises that’s designed to slot in alongside existing x86 servers without any specific cooling or power systems upgrades required.

Looking beyond the impressive performance specifications, the launch of the new systems positions IBM as a key player in the rapidly maturing enterprise AI infrastructure market. As AI workloads scale beyond just pilot projects and go into full production, many businesses have realized that moving huge amounts of sensitive data to the public cloud invites substantial challenges around latency, cost and governance.

IBM’s z17 and LinuxONE platforms give enterprises a way to run AI workloads without moving any data to the cloud. It means they can perform real-time AI inference, fraud detection and automated decision-making on-premises, in the same facility where their transactions are processed. IBM supports this capability with the IBM Spyre Accelerator, which makes it possible to run generative AI and agentic applications right alongside their transactional data workloads, within a robust security boundary.

A number of factors are converging that should make IBM’s slim form-factor platforms a very compelling offering for enterprises, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research. These include the need to bring applications closer to the data for lower-latency, data residency requirements in regulated industries, and also the need to bring AI on-premises for compliance reasons.

“With the Telum processor and the Spire accelerator, IBM has the chip platform to enable this in a smaller, single-rack footprint for both mainframes and Linux platforms,” the analyst said. “Senior executives will want to consider this because IBM brings nimble system performance to their on-premises data, with support for AI on both the z17 and LinuxONE platforms. They’re likely to be very attractive to IBM’s install base, which increasingly wants and needs AI automation.”

The new hardware is being launched together with an updated software stack that includes a new infrastructure management platform. It supports infrastructure-as-code and OpenTelemetry, enabling rapid configuration on the fly and deep operational visibility.

Security has been boosted too, with IBM protecting the new systems with quantum-safe cryptography as a standard feature. There are also new tools for advanced cryptographic operations and CBOL application modernization built into the new systems.

Net-net, IBM’s mainframes and Linux systems aren’t just getting smaller, they’re paving the way for smaller organizations to operationalize AI at large scale more effectively.

Photos: IBM