One of the several things that has kept me very busy at work lately is the launch of the new IBM z17 and it’s sister system, the IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5. I have a lot of fun with these launches, but they’re also a lot of rather high-stress work based around tight deadlines, regardless of how well we try to plan for things.
For the z17 launch, I built out a Developer Journey for IBM Z Day Special Edition, which took attendees across some of the most technical, developer-focused talks of the event. I wasn’t a track lead this year (intentionally), so it was nice to take a step back but still be engaged with the event with an eye on developer content.
On launch day, I spent the day at the IBM Silicon Valley Lab, arriving just before 8AM in anticipation of the keynote where the z17 was announced. IBM Z Day began with a simulcast of this keynote, being held at the new flagship office at One Madison Avenue in New York City.
That afternoon I joined a bunch of my colleagues on-site to partake in a z17 cake. It was mostly IBM Db2 developers that I spoke with, which was an interesting experience because our work threads are quite far apart, so we don’t get much opportunity to interact aside from social settings.
Shortly after launch, I received news from Camillo Sassano of the Industrial Design Team that they had released the 3d-printable z17 files. I love these things, and they’ve really taken off in a broader community with people printing them in various sizes, colors, and remixes. It’s been a lot of fun, and as soon as I had the file in-hand I sent it off to an online 3D printer, and it arrived at home a few days ago.
I think I’ll spend a little time sanding down the sections I want to paint to turn it into a LinuxONE 5, and maybe I’ll see about getting it printed by another 3D printer vendor or two to compare quality. Of course the itch to buy our own 3D printer is always the highest around this time. We’ll see.
Perhaps the biggest thing I had for the launch was writing a blog post about the hardware inside the IBM z17 in A Tour Inside the IBM z17 and it’s sister post a couple weeks later, Journey inside the IBM LinuxONE 5. I started writing these posts not too long after I joined IBM and I realized a lot of people didn’t know what modern mainframes looked like, or how cool they were from a technical perspective. Things have started to change, with official release materials including glimpses inside, and things like videos from the test floor and a lot of really fun social media. The marketing team has also been engaging with technical influencers from YouTube who have been granted tours of various facilities, this time it was ServeTheHome who did a really fun video, THIS is how IBM makes servers that cannot fail. There may not be a reason to see these machines in person, but a lot of us still love to!
Next up on my agenda is continuing with the LinuxONE launch activities by running the “IBM LinuxONE AI Arcade” portion of our IBM booth at the upcoming Red Hat Summit in Boston. We had a meeting with a company that’s helping with the booth, and I had the opportunity to meet some of them recently when I spent a few hours at the RSA Conference in San Francisco to meet up with some folks who were in town for the event.
I’m flying out on Friday to spend the weekend in Boston before the big week of summiting begins. We’ll walk attendees through installing some command-line games before diving into an AI/ML Jupyter notebook that walks them through a fraud-prevention scenario, all running on LinuxONE. I’m looking forward to it, not only do I enjoy these events in general, but it should be a satisfying culmination of a lot of work. Plus, I’ll get to see my first LinuxONE 5, in plexiglass form!