Expanding the IBM LinuxONE 5 family: Introducing IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 and IBM LinuxONE 5 Express
LinuxONE 5 brings AI, security and efficiency together in one platform, built to give organizations a clear path forward, no matter where they are today.
When we introduced IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 last year, we set out to address a growing challenge: enterprises need infrastructure that can run Linux workloads at scale, support AI where the data lives and do so securely and efficiently amid rising energy costs and supply chain pressures. The market response confirmed what we already believed. The combination of security, AI capability and efficiency that IBM LinuxONE delivers is relevant to organizations running Linux at any scale.
That is why today we are expanding the IBM LinuxONE 5 family with two new systems designed to meet this moment: IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 and IBM LinuxONE 5 Express.
For years, the conversations about IBM LinuxONE have often started with scale: “This is for the largest banks, the biggest telcos.” But every business deserves a high-performance solution, regardless of size, scale or throughput. IBM LinuxONE is built to run Linux securely, efficiently and at the right cost. That is just as relevant to a mid-size financial institution running 200 x86 servers as it is to a global bank running 2,000.
Everything that defines IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5, the Telum II processor with its on-chip AI accelerator, quantum-safe cryptography built into hardware, IBM Secure Execution for confidential computing and the same open toolchain your teams are already using, is the foundation of both new models. We did not build a scaled-down version of LinuxONE. We built the right-sized entry point for organizations at different stages of their journey with the platform.
IBM LinuxONE 5 Express is a single 19-inch rack-mountable system that fits into standard data center racks alongside your existing x86 infrastructure, with no special floor space, cooling or power requirements to plan around. This preconfigured system is designed to get organizations running on IBM LinuxONE quickly, with a defined bill of materials and a predictable starting cost, on the same architecture that the largest enterprises in the world depend on.
It is built for organizations that want to consolidate a modest x86 estate, evaluate LinuxONE for the first time, or deploy a specific workload such as digital assets, AI-infused transaction processing or confidential computing, without committing to the footprint of the larger models.
Express does not compromise on security, compliance posture or the upgrade path. It supports the full IBM LinuxONE 5 security model, runs the same distributions of RHEL, SLES and Ubuntu, and can grow within the LinuxONE 5 generation as workload demands increase. The team you have, the toolchain you have and the skills you have all carry forward.
IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 is for organizations that have moved past the evaluation question and are ready to consolidate a substantial portion of their x86 estate. Rockhopper 5 is designed with a smaller physical footprint and uses a software licensing model based on actual workloads run, rather than the number of physical servers deployed. It is built on the same IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 architecture, which can save up to 65% of power consumption, 94% on software costs and 44% on the total cost of ownership over 5 years by moving cloud-native, containerized workloads from a compared x86 solution running the same software products.1
It also supports the IBM Spyre Accelerator, which means generative AI and multi-model inference can run on the platform alongside transactional workloads, on co-located regulated data, inside the security boundary, without a separate GPU tier. For organizations in financial services, healthcare, and other regulated industries, AI workloads can run directly on sensitive data, eliminating the need to move it outside a trusted environment. The result is optimized AI performance and IT efficiency at scale for enterprises of all sizes.
When we talk with CIOs and CTOs, the conversation has changed significantly over the past two years. The question used to be: “How do I modernize my infrastructure?” Now it is: “How do I run AI on my most sensitive data without compromising security or creating another infrastructure tier to manage?”
And underneath that question are even more immediate pressures:
- Data centers are running out of space and power
- Budgets are already stretched
- Hardware costs continue to rise
- Supply chain lead times have skyrocketed
These are not isolated challenges. They are converging. And the answer is not another refresh of the same x86 architecture. It is a platform designed to address all of them together. That is what the IBM LinuxONE 5 family delivers: three solutions aligned to your needs today and designed to scale with you.
IBM LinuxONE 5 Express, IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 and IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 are designed to give organizations a clear, scalable roadmap from evaluation through to full-scale consolidation, all on the same architecture, the same toolchain and the same security model.
Explore the IBM LinuxONE family
Footnotes and disclaimer
1 Save up to 65% of power consumption, 94% on software costs, and 44% on the total cost of ownership over 5 years by moving cloud-native, containerized workloads from a compared x86 solution to an IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5 running the same software products.
Disclaimer: IBM® internal performance tests for the core consolidation study targeted a comparison of the following servers. IBM Machine Type 9175 MAX 136 system consisting of three CPC drawers containing 136 configurable processor units and six I/O drawers to support both network and external storage. The x86 solution used a commercially available enterprise server with two 5th generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8592+ processors, 64 cores per CPU. Both solutions had access to the same storage. The workloads consisted of a containerized online transaction processing (OLTP) WebSphere Liberty v25 application running on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) v4.17, and an EDB Postgres for Kubernetes v1.25 on the same OCP cluster simulating core online banking functions. Both solutions used Red Hat Enterprise Linux v9.5 and KVM. Results may vary. The test results were extrapolated to a typical, complete customer IT solution that includes isolated from each other production and non-production IT environments. TCO included software, hardware, energy, network, data center space, and labor costs. On the IBM z17 side the complete solution requires one IBM z17 Type 9175 MAX 136, and on x86 side, the complete IT solution requires 23 compared servers.