IBM spruces up its mainframes with new support for modern Arm workloads — firm teams up with Arm to run Arm workloads on IBM Z mainframes

IBM and Arm on Thursday announced a strategic collaboration to co-develop dual-architecture enterprise platforms that would enable software designed for the Arm ecosystem to work on IBM Z mainframes and LinuxONE systems in emulation mode. The collab is designed to enable enterprises to run AI and cloud-native workloads originally developed for Arm on mission-critical IBM Z enterprise hardware with ultimate reliability, availability, and security.

Nowadays, a lot of AI frameworks as well as data-intensive cloud-native applications are developed for the Arm ecosystem, whereas IBM Z platforms (based on the Z390x or z/Architecture ISA) excel in reliability, availability, and serviceability but have a narrower native software stack. This is why enterprises increasingly operate a mix of legacy transaction processing alongside AI inference and microservices, which are typically deployed on separate Arm or x86 servers, according to IBM.