IBM and Red Hat announced an initiative to encourage the growth of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z mainframes.

Now, with customers able to unify their IT infrastructure with Linux on their System z mainframe, an opportunity for unparalleled economies of scale and cost reduction has surfaced.

The program will assist companies in the evaluation, deployment and support of this joint platform. It was created in response to the growing adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on mainframes by governments and companies worldwide, who are taking advantage of the security, scalability and low operating costs of the joint platform.

The companies are highlighting the security advantages of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and System z. These include the superior physical security associated with a centralized mainframe server and storage installation, and the use of virtualization technologies such as logical partitions (LPARs), which divide the extensive resources of the mainframe between workloads, while securely isolating each application from the others

System z also takes advantage of Red Hat’s Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux). SELinux enables granular policy-based control over programs’ access to data and kernel resources, preventing a compromised program from acting outside its policy.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is the first Linux operating system to ship with native support for the functionality necessary to meet Common Criteria for Trusted Operating Systems. In addition to the Common Criteria certifications already available to customers of System z, IBM is sponsoring the EAL 4+ certification of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on System z.

Two key factors driving the growth of Linux partitions on the mainframe are the performance and security benefits of consolidating distributed applications. Customers are able to realize these benefits when the applications reside on Linux on System z, and the data also resides on System z on Linux or a traditional mainframe operating system such as z/OS. IBM and Red Hat are forming a joint engineering team to provide additional capabilities for running Linux-based applications on IBM System z. In addition, IBM and Red Hat technical teams have agreed to work together with the open source community as well as within Red Hat’s engineering organization to investigate ways to accelerate and enhance Red Hat Enterprise Linux on System z.

To ensure the best technical support for customers, Red Hat and IBM System z group have strengthened pre-sales and post-sales technical support through the addition of dedicated Red Hat technical staff dedicated to System z. Red Hat has committed engineering resources and will name System z Lead Architects in each of its major geographies. Additionally, Red Hat Global Support Services has created a System z-dedicated support team comprised of its IBM mainframe experts.

IBM and Red Hat will provide customers with solutions that leverage the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM System z in a manner that is easy to deploy. The first joint solution is security-enhanced Red Hat Enterprise Linux on System z that caters to government customers managing secure access to classified and non-classified data. Red Hat and IBM engineering teams have worked together to offer Labeled Security Protection Profile (LSPP) Common Criteria certification for this solution. This operating environment gives government customers the highest assurance that data is protected and that access is granted only to those with proper clearance.