IBM on Monday launched LinuxONE, a Linux-only mainframe server series. The severs include LinuxONE Emperor for large enterprises and Rockhopper for mid-size businesses.

IBM said LinuxONE Emperor can scale up to 8,000 virtual machines or thousands of containers, which would be the most for any single Linux system.

The Linux One Emperor system will be based on IBM's z13 mainframe computer, which had been designed for high-volume mobile transactions.

The LinuxOne system will work with open software such as Apache Spark, MariaDB, PostgreSQL and Chef.

The company also said it partnered with Canonical Ltd to distribute its Ubuntu open source software on LinuxONE and z systems.

The Armonk, New York-based company has relied on sales of the mainframe to boost hardware revenue, which fell 32 percent last quarter, or a 5 percent gain when excluding the impact from divestitures and currency exchange.

IBM Unveils Linux Mainframe System