LinuxONE III
IBM just announced the new LinuxONE III. I know what you’re thinking. What is LinuxONE III?
LinuxONE III is the third generation of IBM’s Enterprise Linux server. This server runs the Linux distributions you already know and love like Ubuntu, SLES and Red Hat. To get a different perspective on how this enterprise server that runs Linux varies from other hardware, check out Lyz’s blog. This Linux server utilises the s390x architecture.
- s390 architecture is a designation where almost all I/O workload is offloaded to specialised hardware.
- The x in s390x indicates the adoption of 64-bit addressing. You’ll also see s390x called Z/Architecture sometimes in hardware documentation.
This all just means that the LinuxONE server was built to allow the main processors to do what you really need them to do and not wait for I/O workload.
The announcement of new hardware always seems so impressive, but what is really in it for me a Linux user and developer? Let’s take a look!
IBM Integrated Accelerator for z Enterprise Data Compression
The IBM Integrated Accelerator for z Enterprise Data Compression is more affectionately known as the Integrated Accelerator. In prior generations of LinuxONE, the zEnterprise Data Compression was an adapter that could be placed in the server and was recognized as an I/O device. With LinuxONE III, the technology is now available on the processor. Performance numbers have shown that data compressed with zlib on LinuxONE III with 4 cores using the Integrated Accelerator have 42 times faster compression[1] then just using software compression.
What does this mean for developers?
TL;DR—Anything using compression can benefit from the zEDC feature without having to do any additional work – including database backups and dumps.
If you find yourself using gzip for compression then zEDC will be of interest to you! Performance studies have shown that compress is 100X faster than software compression on x86.[2] This all happens in just a few processor cycles and needs little additional overhead. Who doesn’t like getting things done quicker?
Other network protocols or applications that use zlib for deflation like Java applications, openssh, subversion or git will also gain acceleration from the zEDC.
Secure Boot
This new feature will check the signature(s) of the software being loaded to ensure that the signature matches the one used by the distributor. The idea is to insure that we are pulling the images intended and not something that has been tampered with or changed in an un-authorized manner.
If you want to leverage this feature, it is only initially available if you’re setup to do a Network Boot (DPM-mode only) or are booting through a device attached through SCSI.
What does this mean for developers?
LinuxONE III is watching your back! There isn’t much for you to do to get access to this. This is really for System Administrators. They’ll have some, hopefully easy, configuration work to do. If you are the developer, you may check with them to see if they’ve heard about this feature. We all like knowing we’re getting exactly what was intended.
10 GbE OSA Network Card
Shared Memory Communications
In a nutshell this means that the LinuxONE III has the capability to allow other logical partitions or even other boxes with improved performance and reduced latency. This is done by using the remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged ethernet (RoCE). Ultimately this translates to less latency in your application workloads and happier end users. Who likes waiting?
In a world where nothing is ever in the same place. This brings those things figuratively closer together when possible. This is done through a network card with a 10 or 25 Gigabit Ethernet connection.
What does this mean for developers?
There isn’t any additional work for you but it is something you’ll see great benefits from if your applications are making many calls to a particular LPAR or location and experience latency or you find that time is of the essence.
There is additional work for your systems team . . . so be sure to keep them supplied with coffee. :-) If they want more information, send them to https://linux-on-z.blogspot.com/p/smc-for-linux-on-ibm-z.html.
But wait, there’s more!
There really is more. At a quick glance:
- Elliptic curve crypto through CP Assist for Cryptographic Functions (CPACF)
ECC is a public-key cryptography based on the mathematical concept of elliptic curves over finite fields. Basically some math lovers, figured out how to use what we’ve learned in school to help us protect data.
For developers – this just means if you are working with encryption or digital signatures you now have more options for your cryptography work. This could be valuable for blockchain implementations.
- Tooling support for LUKS2
Linux Unified Key Setup is a header format that provides an extended on-disk format to store encrypted volume key. This feature allows for a standard interface for enhanced security of protected key cryptography.
For developers – this won’t mean much for you, but should make your system administrators job easier. Ideally for you it should give you reassurance. When utilised, the disk is encrypted and data-at-rest will be encrypted too. In a world of data breaches, every extra step to obscure plain text is ideal.
This would deserve a blog all of its own. This box screams. . . not in the terrifying, horror movie kind of way, but in the I-cannot-contain-myself kind of way. Performance testing showed that one could start 100 KVM guests, in parallel, 2.1x faster using 4 cores on a LinuxONE III LPAR versus using a compared Intel platform[3]. That number alone is impressive but doesn’t begin to dive into the engineering behind the processor that really makes LinuxONE unique. In the meantime, if speeds and feeds is your thing, check out the interactive demo.
For developers – The possibilities for horizontal scaling and improved performance are almost unbounded. Even the poorest written code could look pretty impressive here.
If you’re interested in taking a first hand look at LinuxONE, be sure to check out the LinuxONE Community Cloud.
For developers – Also check out the code patterns aka technology guides for LinuxONE on the Community Cloud landing page.
For more information:
IBM LinuxONE III
IT Infrastructure: IBM LinuxONE
[1] DISCLAIMER: Performance results based on IBM internal tests running the minigzip benchmark with compression level -1 from the dfltcc branch of zlib (downloaded from https://github.com/iii-i/zlib/tree/dfltcc-20190708). Source data files were taken from the Large Corpus (downloaded from http://corpus.canterbury.ac.nz/descriptions). Results may vary. LinuxONE III configuration: LPAR with 4 dedicated cores, 64 GB memory, 40 GB DASD storage, SLES 12 SP4 (SMT mode).
[2] Performance results based on geometric mean of single threaded Java application runs using java.util.zip.Deflater class compressing classical literature text books in memory using various buffers sizes on LinuxONE III RHEL 7.6 alternate Kernel 4.14 versus Skylake Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold CPU @ 2.60GHz Ubuntu 18.04 kernel 4.15.
[3] DISCLAIMER: Performance results based on IBM internal tests starting up 100 KVM guests in parallel using "virsh start" command. KVM guests were stored using qcow2 images. Results may vary.