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 In today’s digital world, you must strike a balance between technical and business needs — addressing service delivery, availability, flexibility, skills and time to market — while optimizing your digital transformation to hybrid cloud. The platform underpinning your hybrid cloud strategy must be reliable, flexible and agile to meet your current business needs while helping you to prepare with confidence for the future.

Today, we’re making a series of exciting announcements to help our clients become even more flexible, fast and secure. We are extending the capabilities of IBM z15 and LinuxONE III across cloud native development, data protection, flexible configuration and resiliency.

Accelerate your journey to cloud 

We’ve made a variety of enhancements enabling our clients to have a common developer experience on IBM Z and LinuxONE, including:

• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is generally available for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE and recently Red Hat released OpenShift 4.5 on the platform. This brings together the cloud-native world of containers and Kubernetes with the security, scalability and reliability features of IBM enterprise servers.
• Cloud Pak for Applications 4.2: The latest cloud-native application development tools and languages are available on IBM Z, designed to simplify life for developers, operations and architects. Now you can bring new applications to market quicker, leveraging IBM Z’s scale, security, and resiliency.
• Expanded access to IBM z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) enables clients to deploy a large ecosystem of open source and Linux on IBM Z applications on their native z/OS environment without requiring a separate Linux server (IFL). The latest open source tools, NoSQL databases, analytics frameworks, and application servers are all now easily accessible.
• IBM Secure Execution for Linux extends confidential computing to new heights through the implementation of a scalable trusted execution environment (TEE) on LinuxONE, which allows organizations to further protect and isolate virtual machines.
• Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z is designed to automate z/OS applications and IT infrastructure as part of a consistent overall automation strategy across different environments using developer-friendly Ansible tools familiar with your teams.

Protect and keep your data private

Customers need to protect not only the security of their data but its confidentiality as well as it travels throughout the enterprise. Pervasive encryption was the first step towards enabling extensive encryption of data in-flight and at-rest, simplifying data protection while helping to reduce the costs associated with compliance. In addition, IBM offers protection of data privacy as data travels from your system of record to distributed and hybrid cloud environments.

• IBM Data Privacy Passports V1.0.1 now supports additional enforcement techniques, providing users with more options to access protected data.
• Cryptographic scale is a must-have in a cloud service environment to support a high volume of tenants. IBM z15 and LinuxONE III can now support up to 60 crypto hardware security modules (HSMs) and more domains, allowing for over 5100 virtual highly secured HSMs for ultimate scalability. Similarly, IBM z15 T02 and LinuxONE III LT2 can support up to 40 HSMs, for 1600 virtual HSMs.

Cyber resiliency lets you run with confidence

Clients realize that to protect their business, they must often fend off increasingly sophisticated threats, recover quickly from downtime, and meet unforeseen spikes in demand — all while delivering competitive service levels. IT resiliency gives clients the ability to adapt to planned or unplanned events while keeping services running continuously. System Recovery Boost now delivers new recovery process boosts to address a range of sysplex recovery processes, including sysplex partitioning, coupling facility structure and coupling facility data sharing member recovery, and HyperSwap recovery. With these enhancements, clients can expedite the return to normal operations and catch up on workload backlog after a sysplex event.

Flexible computing to make your life easier

New enhancements accelerate critical workloads and provide additional data center efficiencies:

• A new hardware accelerator for sort functions using a CPU co-processor called the Integrated Accelerator for Z Sort is designed to reduce elapsed time for critical sort workloads during batch processing and help improve Db2 database reorganization time.
• New IBM z15 T02 flexible physical configuration options set aside reserved space in the rack to integrate select storage devices such as IBM DS8910F and switches. Storage integration can help save space, which is perfect for clients who have smaller I/O configurations and can take advantage of running a smaller footprint.

The z15 and LinuxONE III continuous delivery process extends the innovations delivered earlier in the generation, enabling clients to exploit their IBM Z investments as they continue on their journey to the cloud. The security, resiliency and cloud-native capabilities of IBM z15 and LinuxONE III help clients to leverage their secure and reliable foundation for hybrid cloud, while also allowing them to respond to evolving business pressures — setting them up for success now and in the future.

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