IBM Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Linux on Z, 5 Years of LinuxONE

IBM Linux

Today, IBM celebrates not one but three important milestones in their 20-year-long relationship with Linux and the Open Source community, 20th anniversary of Linux on Z, 5th anniversary of LinuxONE and first anniversary of Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxOne, as the company informs 9to5Linux.

Believe it or not, this month marks 20 years since IBM made the smart choice of opening its proprietary computer technology and announcing it would support Linux on IBM Z, a family of z/Architecture mainframe computers from the Z900 series, which is now used by more than two-thirds of the Fortune 100 companies to protect their highly sensitive data.

It was back in 1999 when the original IBM team in Böblingen brought the idea of Linux on the IBM mainframe to Linus Torvalds, porting the Linux kernel to the S/390 architecture, and then publishing the collection of patches and additions needed to enable Linux for IBM System/390.

“We saw Linux as the next big shift where our clients were headed,” remembers Ross Mauri, GM of IBM Z. “A pioneering project at IBM’s development labs led to a remarkable synergy between IBM’s Z enterprise servers and the emerging Linux operating system.”

Of course, this was only the beginning of a fruitful partnership, which ultimately opened the path to some of today’s key technologies like cloud, containers, and virtualization. Fast forward to 2015, IBM announced IBM LinuxONE, introducing Linux-powered enterprise servers to the world.

Today, the company also celebrates one year since IBM partnered with Red Hat to advance the hybrid cloud by bringing the Red Hat OpenShift open-source container application platform based on Kubernetes to IBM Z and LinuxONE.

IBM is an innovative company that recently announced the availability of their fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) toolkit for IBM Z and x86 architectures as Docker containers based on CentOS, Fedora and Ubuntu Linux distributions.

To mark these occasions, IBM has put together a nice infographic that you can see below, which will definitely bring back memories for many of you out there. Happy anniversary to IBM from 9to5Linux, and here’s to the next 20 years of Linux on the IBM mainframe!

Last updated 4 years ago

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