Since 1986, Oracle and IBM have been providing customers with compelling joint solutions that combine Oracle’s technology and application software with IBM’s complementary hardware, software, and services solutions. More than 100,000 joint clients benefit from the strength and stability of the Oracle and IBM alliance, which offers technology, applications, services, and hardware solutions. These solutions mitigate risk, boost efficiency, and lower total cost of ownership.

IBM is a Diamond level Partner in the Oracle Partner Network, which delivers the proven combination of industry insight, extensive real-world Oracle applications experience, deep technical skills, and high-performance servers and storage to create a complete business solution with a defined return on investment. From application selection, purchase and implementation to upgrade and maintenance, we help organizations reduce the total cost of ownership and the complexity of managing their current and future applications environment while building a solid base for business growth.

This chapter includes the following topics:

Growth impacts your business. More clients, transactions, servers, mobile devices, networking, and databases can create significant challenges for any enterprise’s infrastructure, resulting in unnecessary complexity, inefficiency, and cost.

IBM and Oracle provide a premier enterprise infrastructure that is simple, secure, scalable, and cost-effective in supporting your transformation in the digital economy.

Enterprises require a trusted IT infrastructure that is dynamic, scalable, and flexible to support both mission-critical work and the development and deployment of new workloads. Coupled with innovative solutions from Oracle, the IBM z13® and IBM z13s™ can deliver advanced performance, security, resiliency, availability, and extreme virtualization to provide high levels of qualities of service. The IBM z13 and IBM z13s can deliver advanced performance, security, resiliency, availability, and virtualization to provide high levels of qualities of service.

The z13, designed for larger enterprises, offers massive scalability for secure data serving and high-volume transaction processing. It is ideally suited for consolidating large-scale distributed environments and the introduction of new in-memory workloads. The IBM z13s is designed as an entry-level enterprise server for any growing business that seeks the same z Systems technologies’ qualities of service, flexibility, and performance.

Linux is available on various computing platforms, from set top boxes and handheld devices to the largest servers. After your applications are running on Linux, you are no longer tied to a specific hardware platform. You control the choice of hardware platform that supports your application.

Workloads that are running on IBM z Systems benefit from a hardware platform that includes specialized processors, cryptographic cards with dedicated RISC processors, and a combination of hypervisors that allow unparalleled flexibility in Linux deployment.

A major benefit of Linux is that it is open source. Hundreds of Linux distributions are available for almost every computing platform. The following enterprise distributions¹ of Linux are tested on IBM z Systems (Red Hat and SUSE are the certified and supported Linux distributions for deploying Oracle solutions on the IBM z Systems platform):

These Linux distributions provide customers who are using Linux with various support options, including 24 x 7 support with one-hour response time worldwide for customers who are running production systems. Including the Linux operating system, all of the major Linux distributions offer several other open source products that they also fully support.

IBM z Systems is a portfolio of hardware, software, and solutions for an enterprise-grade Linux environment. It is designed to run more transactions faster and with more security and reliability specifically for the open community. It fully embraces open source-based technology.

The following are some key points to consider that tie to the value of deploying Oracle on IBM z Systems:

IBM z Systems can help deliver advanced performance, security, resiliency, availability, and virtualization for a high quality of service. Additionally, they offer massive scalability for secure data serving, high-volume transaction processing, and large-scale consolidation.

IBM z Systems has the world’s fastest commercially available processor. Built for speed, z Systems supports simultaneous multi-threading for Linux and Java workloads. It helps deliver outstanding transaction processing and data serving performance. IBM z Systems offers excellent economies of scale, supporting up to 141 Linux cores, up to 85 logical partitions for secured workload isolation and more efficient use of critical data. Coupled with up to 10 TB of memory, and large memory pools with 4 levels of cache, IBM z Systems is ideally suited for consolidating large-scale distributed environments and the introduction of new in-memory workloads.

It can support up to thousands of virtual Linux servers on a single footprint. That means that the virtualization capabilities in a single z Systems platform can result in a less complex Linux infrastructure with fewer components, less management, less space requirements, and optimized core workload efficiency.

For more information about the value of deploying Oracle Database Release 12cR1 that is running Linux on IBM z Systems, see the solution data sheet on the IBM Techdocs support website.

Oracle and IBM experts work together to provide design, development, testing, technical support, and education to support your Oracle solutions that are running Linux on z Systems. These resources are provided to help ensure your solution performance and provide training to your IT staff.

For more information about how z Systems provides the perfect platform for running Oracle and Open Source mission-critical Linux applications for fast deployment and cost savings, see the IBM z Systems website.