Less than a year after their announcement that they planned to invest a billion dollars in the Linux platform , IBM continues to ramp up their Linux play by rolling out Linux on Power System servers across 54 of the IBM Innovation and Client Centers worldwide. This comes almost two years after IBM announced that they had ported Linux to the Power Server platform.

The new services, announced last week at LinuxCon North America, are designed to get customers up and running on the Power Server environment while keeping their options open in terms of Linux flavor and applications. Support and training is now available to developers to build applications that can make use of the virtualization and parallel processing features of the Power Systems servers using Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Enterprise Server.

Doug Balog, General Manager of IBM Power Systems, has said that he believes that the Power system architecture, which is now positioned as an open source hardware and software solution set via the OpenPower Foundation, is a better choice for big data analytics and cloud computing than the racks of generic servers found in most datacenters.

The rollout of these new Linux services to customers, with their associated hands-on development and deployment expertise, should allow IBM to broaden the reach of Power Systems expertise. IBM can expand their customer base in the market segment of customers looking for high-performance big data analytics and more effective and efficient use of resources devoted to datacenter hardware and software.

This dovetails in neatly with IBM’s billion dollar investment in new datacenter facilities, including those supporting bare-metal cloud services via their Softlayer unit, of which IBM has announced two new datacenters to be built in Australia, just this week.