IBM’s Linux on the mainframe portfolio has had a mid-winter brush up, with new tools and a 50 per cent increase in the number of Linux flavours it supports.

The vendor said it would optimise two of its recently acquired technologies for LinuxONE: Cloudant, the enterprise grade NoSQL database it bought in 2014, and Strongloop, the mobile backend as a service platform it acquired last year.

At the same time, it said that SUSE tools would be “employed to manage public, private and hybrid clouds running on LinuxONE” as part of a collaboration on OpenStack.

Promising even more Blueberry jam tomorrow, the Apache-based IBM Open Platform will be available on LinuxONE from March. At the same time, the Open Management Runtime project - the one that infuses dynamic scripting languages with enterprise grade strength - has been optimised for the LinuxOne lineup.

And following up an alliance struck last year, IBM said it would deliver on its promise to bring Ubuntu to LinuxONE, with Canonical’s distribution and associated cloud tool sets lining up alongside incumbents Red Hat and SUSE, though reports seem confused as to whether that has happened already, or is due in April.

It’s not all about the software. IBM also said it would give its Emperor and Rockhopper boxes a makeover to improve speed and processing power.

The new Rockhopper can run up to 20 4.3GHz cores, and support 4TB of memory, compared to the previous incarnation's 4.2GHz 12 core max, with 500GB of RAM. The new Emperor keeps its predecessor's 141 5.0GHz cores and 10TB of share memory, but gets 667 integrated assist processors for high availability, I/O intensive workloads, instead of the old bird's 640 dedicated I/O (input/output) processors.®