Mainframes are often thought of as being large systems that are intended only for the biggest of enterprises. That's a misconception that IBM is aiming to dispel with its new LinuxONE 4 Express that is being announced today.

The IBM LinuxONE 4 Express is designed to extend the capabilities of the LinuxONE 4 and the IBM z16 mainframes that were first announced in 2023, to small and medium businesses looking to build hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) strategies. The new system aims to offer strong security, resilience and cost-savings in an accessible package.

“While the current LinuxONE 4 and IBM z16 single-frame, multi-frame and rack-mount options offer complete customization and capacity options, the new LinuxONE 4 Express is built to simplify the experience for SMBs and start ups by offering three pre-configured machine sizes and pricing options as well as full solution add-on packages,” Rick Schoonmaker, director, IBM Z and LinuxONE hardware product management at IBM, told SDxCentral. “It also brings the AI, security and resiliency capabilities of LinuxONE 4 at a low entry price point to help clients address a wide range of use cases.”

What's inside the LinuxONE 4 Express

The IBM LinuxONE 4 Express comes with up to 16 Integrated Facility for Linux (IFLs), which are functionally similar to compute cores on other system architectures.

The system is powered by the IBM Telum processor, which uses 7nm technology and runs at 4.6GHz processor frequency and can support up to 864 GB of memory. Schoonmaker said that since the IBM LinuxONE 4 Express is a rack mount model, organizations can add whatever storage they want to the rack, there are no restrictions.

The Telum processor integrates AI acceleration via an on-chip AI coprocessor to reduce latency and deliver high performance for in-transaction inferencing. Schoonmaker said that existing LinuxONE 4 customers are leveraging the Telum processors on-chip AI acceleration capabilities for fraud detection, medical imaging and insurance-claims processing.

Security is at the foundation of LinuxONE 4 Express

A critical element of the LinuxONE mainframe is the IBM Secure Execution for Linux capability.

Schoonmaker saidthat IBM Secure Execution for Linux protects workload data that runs in a virtual machine guest from being inspected or modified by the server environment. He noted that in a multiworkload environment, data in use can be visible to administrators who have no business managing it. That can potentially open the door to insider attacks through malicious insiders, or external attacks through compromised credentials.

“Secure Execution for Linux provides scalable isolation for individual workloads to help protect against attacks such as those from malicious administrative access,” he said.

Why would a small business want a mainframe?

The default system architecture for small and mid-sized businesses has long been x86.

Schoonmaker argued that as companies grapple with security breaches and aim to adopt AI, they need IT infrastructure that they can depend on to support their businesses as they grow.

“When compared with x86 systems, LinuxONE provides a high level of scalability that allows clients to consolidate several x86 workloads to just one LinuxONE system,” he said. “This leads to both cost, space and energy savings, not to mention simplifying IT operations as a whole.”