Cockroach Labs Brings Distributed SQL to IBM LinuxONE and Linux on IBM Z

NEW YORK, May 7, 2025 — Cockroach Labs today announced that its flagship product CockroachDB will support IBM LinuxONE and IBM Z systems. This strategic expansion to support the IBM s390x processor architecture brings CockroachDB’s elastic scalability to some of the industry’s most secured and reliable enterprise platforms. IBM customers can now deploy CockroachDB on IBM LinuxONE and Linux on IBM Z, complementing their existing investments with a modern data infrastructure built for hybrid cloud deployments and GenAI initiatives.

Enterprise IT continues to demand security, reliability, and compliance—especially in highly regulated industries including banking, government, healthcare, transportation and retail, where these capabilities are essential to maintaining trust and operational continuity. Celent estimates that a significant 70% of banking, cards, and payments transactions globally run on IBM Z mainframes. By enabling CockroachDB to run natively on the s390x architecture, Cockroach Labs brings a fully featured, PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database directly to IBM LinuxONE and Linux on IBM Z.

“Our enterprise clients in regulated industries can now leverage CockroachDB as a cloud-native, distributed, PostgreSQL-compatible database on their IBM platforms,” said Marcel Mitran, IBM Fellow and CTO Cloud Platform, IBM Z and LinuxONE. “This can help our joint clients to innovate, modernize and build trust in their core applications while maximizing the security and resilience of IBM’s platforms.”

CockroachDB on IBM s390x processor architecture offers several synergies:

• Resiliency for Mission-Critical Workloads: CockroachDB is designed to deliver business continuity that regulated industries desire, for resilience and reliability around mission-critical workloads. CockroachDBs’ distributed, active-active architecture replicates data across multiple cluster nodes, designed for seamless failover to survive machine, or even data center, outages. When deployed on IBM’s s390x architecture, CockroachDB can further capitalize on the platform’s inherent performance, security, and availability features. Together, this combination is built to support applications such as core banking, payment processing, and identity management systems—use cases that demand continuous availability and uncompromising scalability.
• Modern, Scalable PostgreSQL Solution: Developers and architects can leverage CockroachDB’s PostgreSQL-compatible SQL interface and gain the advantages of its horizontal scalability on IBM’s vertically scalable architecture. Organizations can dynamically scale workloads across multiple s390x systems and partitions, to deliver on-demand capacity and cloud-like flexibility within an on-premises environment.
• Hybrid Cloud Flexibility: CockroachDB can operate as part of a broader hybrid cloud deployment, spanning on-premises and public cloud as a single logical database cluster. This native interoperability is designed to enable IT teams to optimize compliance, performance, and cost—deploying each workload on the infrastructure that suits it best—without the operational complexity and high costs of managing separate data platforms or replicating data across silos.
• Security Capabilities: IBM’s s390x architecture offers pervasive encryption, confidential computing, and enterprise-grade key management. Running CockroachDB on these platforms extends those security benefits to the database layer. Sensitive data stays protected within systems equipped with IBM’s hardware security modules and centralized key management, while CockroachDB adds fine-grained access controls and tamper-proof distributed storage—enabling true end-to-end data security.

“Cockroach Labs’ support for IBM s390x processor architecture, underscores our strategic commitment to meet customers wherever their mission-critical workloads deploy,” said Allen Terleto, VP, Global Partners and Ecosystem, Cockroach Labs. “IBM Z continues to serve as the backbone of the world’s most critical infrastructure and supports the most demanding industries. By embracing IBM Z and LinuxONE, Cockroach Labs empowers these organizations to modernize in place, uniting IBM’s security and reliability with CockroachDB’s resilience and scalability. It also marks a major milestone in our hybrid cloud strategy, empowering customers’ applications with a truly distributed SQL database that now seamlessly spans from IBM Z and LinuxONE on-premises to the cloud.”

With support for IBM s390x processor architecture, CockroachDB can be central to enterprises’ strategy to accelerate digital transformation and modernization on their own terms, leveraging core systems built for the era of generative AI. CockroachDB helps organizations unlock AI-driven insights and innovation built to optimize ROI and strengthen the operational resilience of existing systems of record.

For more information about IBM LinuxONE 5 and its capabilities, visit ibm.com/linuxone-5.

About Cockroach Labs

Cockroach Labs is a pioneering software company at the forefront of database technology, dedicated to delivering resilient and scalable database solutions to run mission-critical workloads for the world’s most important businesses. The company’s clients include Form3, Hard Rock Digital, and Shipt, Fortune 50 global financial institutions as well as retail and media industry leaders. With a mission to scale when others fail, Cockroach Labs is advancing the way businesses manage their data with its innovative cloud native distributed SQL database, CockroachDB.

Source: Cockroach Labs