F5 NGINX Brings Application Modernization to New IBM z16 and LinuxONE 4 Single Frame and Rack Mount Models

New IBM Configurations Designed for Flexibility, Sustainability, and Security Within the Data Center

We are excited to collaborate with IBM as the company unveils its new IBM z16 and LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 single frame and rack mount models, available globally on May 17, 2023. Powered by the IBM Telum processor, these new configurations are designed for highly efficient data centers with sustainability in mind. F5 NGINX customers can make more effective use of their data center space while remaining resilient in the midst of ongoing global uncertainty.

With NGINX, businesses can now accelerate content and application delivery with high performance, reliability, and security. In a nutshell, DevOps leaders can deliver modern applications and APIs at scale, fast, and with more confidence with the NGINX addition to their already powerful solution.

Accelerating Content and Application Delivery with NGINX

As a part of the IBM Ecosystem, NGINX is empowering organizations to accelerate application modernization and embrace digital transformation in a hybrid cloud environment. Businesses can now accelerate content and application delivery with cloud‑native and advanced traffic management through this new end-to-end, enterprise‑grade combination platform for application and web service management.

With NGINX, leading businesses can now:

• Achieve blazingly fast web‑traffic handling with the same trusted, familiar NGINX web server, reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache functionalities
• Unlock advanced traffic management services such as JWT authentication, active health checks, and much more
• Perform seamless and frictionless lift-and-shift of applications with the ability to Bring Your Own Configuration (BYOC), eliminating the learning curve when deploying apps in both the data center and cloud
• Accelerate development and deployment of applications with consistency on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
• Attain next‑level high availability, superior performance, and security – at both the hardware and software level
• Gain business agility by scaling up and down as demand changes
• Gain near‑zero downtime and extremely high SLAs for an enhanced customer experience

Integration with the IBM Z Operations Insight Suite gives NGINX users deep insights into the operations of LinuxONE infrastructure with a single point of data collection for processing and analysis of operational data, as well as monitoring of NGINX traffic. Further integrations are possible with Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, and Splunk.

Addressing Today’s Changing IT Landscape

Every day, clients face challenges in delivering integrated digital services. According to the recent IBM Transformation Index: State of Cloud report, organizations cite security, management of complex environments, and regulatory compliance as top challenges to integrating workloads in a hybrid cloud. In today’s evolving IT landscape, it can be difficult to meet business objectives while adhering to environmental regulations and increasing costs.

The new rack mount model fulfills the same reliability standards as all IBM z16 and LinuxONE systems and is designed for client‑owned data center racks and power distribution units. This footprint is architected to let companies co‑locate the latest z16 and LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 technology with distributed infrastructure, and opens opportunities to include storage, SAN, and switches in one frame, to optimize both data center planning and latency for specific computing projects. Installing these systems in the data center can help create a new class of use cases, including data center design, optimized edge computing, and data sovereignty for regulated industries.

Securing Data on a Highly Available System

According to IBM’s Cost of a data breach report – conducted independently by Ponemon Institute, and sponsored, analyzed, and published by IBM Security – organizations with a hybrid cloud model reported lower average cost of a data breach (about $3.8 million) than organizations with public or private cloud models. IBM z16 and LinuxONE systems help support a secured, highly available hybrid IT environment, which is critical to customer outcomes for essential industries like healthcare, financial services, government, and insurance.

Today’s more sophisticated cyberthreats require new standards of protection. IBM z16 and LinuxONE provide high levels of resilience in support of mission‑critical workloads. These high availability levels can help Cloud Architects, Software Devs, SecDevs, System Architects, Platform Ops, NetOps, and IT executives maintain access to data from their business systems, partner networks, financial accounts, medical records, and any other business or personal information, whenever they need it. IBM z16 and LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 single frame and rack mount systems offer a broad range of security capabilities, including confidential computing, centralized key management, and quantum‑safe cryptography.

Optimizing Flexibility and Sustainability

IBM z16 and LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 single frame models are built to help maximize flexibility and sustainability in data centers. With a new partition‑level power monitoring capability and additional environmental metrics, these single frame systems are dedicated to helping clients reach their sustainability goals, reducing space and energy consumption in the data center. These key advantages distinguish the platforms for sustainability in the data center, especially when consolidating workloads from x86 servers.

As a part of the IBM Ecosystem, NGINX is helping companies unlock the value of their infrastructure investments by implementing the tools and technologies designed to help them succeed in a hybrid cloud world. We are excited to be working closely with the IBM Ecosystem to bring new innovations to our clients.

Additional Information

• Read IBM’s press release
• Learn more about F5 NGINX and IBM
• Learn more about IBM z16 and LinuxONE 4