Scale up for Linux on IBM Z

This book was written by IBM® IT specialists who have experience implementing IBM Z® solutions, especially Linux on IBM LinuxONE™ (LinuxONE) or IBM Z servers. Therefore, the content of this book follows the guidelines from Linux and IBM z/VM® regarding LinuxONE and IBM Z installations. The preferred practices described in this book are gathered from the experiences of those specialists in hundreds of projects at IBM and customer environments.

This publication provides you with all of the information that you need to decide the best scaling architecture when implementing Linux on IBM Z or LinuxONE. This book has the following goals:

To inform you about x86 sprawl problems
To inform you that x86 Vertical Scale out architectures are problematic going forward
To provide solutions to x86 server sprawl problems
To inform you about the LinuxONE and IBM Z differentiation for each x86 server sprawl problem
To provide virtulization and security options for LinuxOne and IBM Z

The scaling up and scaling out architectures enable you to scale the capacity of an existing system to attend a sporadic application demand or an application workload. This gives you some freedom to operate in the environment. However, if this activity is performed without correct planning and the correct architecture choice, it leads to a server sprawl situation where your environment houses more servers than it should based on its current and predicted requirements.
Although scaling out on x86 systems is a common form of scaling because of their popularity, the x86 systems were originally designed as cheap computers. Unfortunately, the scale out on x86 can easily become a problem in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO) when the environment starts to increase in terms of number of physical servers.

The LinuxONE and IBM Z servers solve the sprawl problem caused by the scaling out of x86 servers, and are an excellent choice for cloud, mobile, big data, blockchain, analytics, and other workloads that require a robust and flexible environment.

This publication describes the advantages and disadvantages of the scaling options.

The audience of this publication consists of the following groups:

Customers, IBM Business Partners, and IBM consultants planning and installing Linux on IBM Z, IBM Z family or x86 platform
System administrators administering the Linux Systems

If you are a customer considering LinuxONE and IBM Z family as a platform for your applications (analytics, blockchain, cloud, or other) or a pre-sales person, read those publications.