Red Hat scales up to IBM mainframes

IBM customers can now buy IBM mainframes running Red Hat, completing the Linux offering across the entire IBM server range.

Red Hat-ready servers are available at the lower end with the xseries server right through the pseries and iseries to the zserver at the very high end.

Andy Hoiles, Linux business manager for EMEA north region, said: "This is very significant in that a lot of large customers will own a range of IBM servers. This will now give them a tremendous opportunity to deploy business solutions on a range of servers."

Red Hat will provide support and services. Hoiles added: "The ability to have one operating system across such a varied platform makes a real alternative to what they're currently running."

Red Hat will now sit alongside SuSe and TurboLinux at IBM's top-end offerings. Hoiles concluded: "Linux on the mainframe is a very good proposition."