Twenty years ago, the contrast would have been too great to believe. IBM Corp., the stalwart of proprietary enterprise technology, has teamed up with Canonical Ltd. for a brand new line of Linux mainframes geared towards  modern cloud workloads. The alliance represents a culmination of its rekindled love-afraid with the open-source ecosystem.

The initial spark can be traced back two years to when IBM chucked a billion dollars at the free operating system in an effort to provide better integration with its high-end servers. The move came as an attempt to replicate the success of a similar ten-figure investment at the turn of the millennium that focused mainly on big iron and helped Linux secure its current dominant position in the data center.

The new mainframe series brings that long-running initiative full circle. IBM is introducing two models on launch: Rockhopper, an entry-level offering aimed at proof-of-concept deployments and customers in emerging markets, and Emperor. While both borrow their names from the penguin mascot of Linux, they differ significantly under the hood.

Emperor is a full-blown system based on the latest IBM z13 mainframe introduced earlier this year that can accommodate up to 8,000 virtual machines and many more containers, according to the company. The decision to add support for the emerging virtualization standard in addition to regular hypervisors reflects a broader focus on open-source software that is being flaunted openly.

Besides compatibility with Canonical’s popular Ubuntu flavor of Linux, which joins the existing support for the distributions from its two biggest rivals, IBM is also throwing in a host of other free technologies including MongoDB, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Chef. But standing out in particular is Apache Spark, which itself became the recipient of a billion-dollar investment from the company a few months back.

To drive interest around its new Linux systems, IBM is joining forces with nearly a dozen industry heavyweights in a consortium dedicated to fostering the use of the operating system on mainframes. Its first contribution is predictive analytics technology for detecting operational problems that will become available under an open-source license for developers to port onto other platforms.

Photo via IBM