Why does AI require a new approach to infrastructure? AI is changing enterprise infrastructure requirements by increasing demand for continuous data availability, high concurrency, and real-time decision-making. Customers expect uninterrupted experiences, and AI-driven systems depend on continuous, reliable access to current data. Even a few minutes of downtime can result in significant financial and reputational loss.
As Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball CEO recently observed, “The tsunami of autonomous agents has arrived.” Supporting those systems requires elastic infrastructure and software that can seamlessly scale and work together.
Always-on infrastructure is becoming a prerequisite for enterprise AI. As organizations deploy AI assistants, autonomous workflows, and agentic applications into production, the underlying data platform must deliver consistent access to current data while scaling to unpredictable demand. From real-time payments to AI-driven applications, enterprises rely on critical services such as digital banking and wallets, payment processing, trading and order management, and identity and access management (IAM).
IBM LinuxONE is IBM’s enterprise-class Linux platform, designed for extreme reliability, security, and performance trusted by industries where downtime is not an option.
CockroachDB's distributed SQL and integrated vector search capabilities provide the data foundation required for AI applications, supporting semantic retrieval, embeddings, agent memory, and transactional consistency. LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 delivers the resilient, secure, and scalable infrastructure needed to run those workloads in production.
Why traditional infrastructure falls short for AI workloads 
Traditional infrastructure was not designed for the scale, availability, and concurrency requirements of modern AI workloads. Commodity infrastructure fails frequently, and databases are forced to compensate with complex failover and recovery mechanisms. This leads to higher costs, increased operational burden, and systems that are reactive rather than resilient. Additionally, these systems scale linearly and lack true distributed capabilities.
When operations and engineering teams try to address resilience, scale, and performance with disjointed point solutions, the result is disparate data sprawl with complex IT management capabilities.
Beyond increasing operational overhead, fragmented architectures can slow application delivery and make it harder for teams to introduce new AI capabilities with confidence. Consolidating infrastructure and data services helps organizations reduce complexity while improving operational agility as workloads evolve.
What is the Always-On Data Foundation?
The Always-On Data Foundation combines CockroachDB and IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 to provide a resilient data platform for enterprise AI and mission-critical workloads. Today, Cockroach Labs and IBM introduce this integrated architecture, powered by the newly announced LinuxONE Rockhopper 5.
Replacing fragmented stacks with a tightly integrated combination of enterprise infrastructure and distributed SQL, this solution supports continuous availability and seamless elasticity. When database software is fundamentally aware of, and optimized for, its underlying hardware, it can intelligently distribute workloads to maximize resilience and throughput.
This solution is purpose‑built for enterprise AI workloads where infrastructure doesn’t just support workloads, it actively enables intelligent, autonomous systems. The platform is engineered to meet the demands of real‑time AI and agentic workloads.
Related
Vector Search Meets Distributed SQL for AI Workloads -- AI applications need more than a resilient data layer: They need one that can handle semantic search, embeddings, and real-time vector retrieval alongside transactional data. This guide explores how distributed SQL enables unified AI data architecture without the complexity of managing separate vector stores.
CockroachDB on LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 embeds AI‑readiness directly into the foundation. By tightly integrating enterprise infrastructure with distributed SQL, it creates a system where the database is not just distributed but intelligent and context‑aware. It is optimized to take advantage of the underlying hardware it runs on, and dynamically optimizes workload placement to ensure that AI models and agents always have fast, reliable access to data.
The converged platform provides a resilient foundation for distributed AI workloads that require both continuous availability and transactional consistency. Rather than treating resilience as a separate operational concern, infrastructure and the database work together to help support reliable application behavior under changing demand.
In the agentic era. AI agents are not passive; they continuously observe, decide, and act. They require:
Massive concurrency to operate at scale
Global consistency to make accurate decisions
Zero‑downtime execution to avoid disruption in real‑time processes
Related
The distributed SQL foundation for agentic scale – Agentic systems don't just need more compute, they need a data layer built to handle continuous, concurrent, autonomous activity at scale. Watch this webinar to see how distributed SQL meets the unique demands of agentic AI in production.
What makes this architecture different?
Combining enterprise infrastructure with distributed SQL removes traditional tradeoffs between resilience, scalability, and operational complexity. It’s not about improving uptime, but removing downtime as a design concern.
LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 and CockroachDB eliminate the trade-offs of traditional architectures by co-designing reliability into every layer:
Hardware designed to avoid failure: LinuxONE Rockhopper 5 Express brings highly efficient, enterprise-grade reliability (99.999999% availability) into an accessible form factor to consolidate systems and reduce physical failure rates.
Database designed to survive failure: CockroachDB operates as a natively distributed SQL layer, ensuring seamless elasticity and continuous availability even when regional disruptions occur.
Ready for the Agentic Era
This hardware-software synergy eliminates traditional bottlenecks, delivering the real-time consistency and hyper-concurrency autonomous AI agents demand. This is not theoretical; it’s the exact architecture, currently:
Scaling AI to handle trillions of objects
Controlling agent and data access for hundreds of millions of users
Powering mission-critical AI solutions designed to streamline efficiency
Building resilient AI infrastructure across hybrid cloud
Resilient AI infrastructure depends on keeping applications close to their data while maintaining consistency across hybrid cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. This integrated foundation anchors a strategic hybrid cloud and data platform strategy. By deploying CockroachDB’s natively distributed, PostgreSQL-compatible data services across the LinuxONE portfolio, organizations can position infrastructure and software directly adjacent to their applications.
Historically, bridging on-premises environments, public clouds, and the edge meant accepting severe tradeoffs between latency, consistency, and security. This architecture eliminates those compromises, allowing enterprises to push compute and data closer to the application layer. It drastically reduces latency for real-time AI and agentic workflows, while maintaining strict global consistency and data sovereignty.
CockroachDB runs on LinuxONE systems, including LinuxONE Rockhopper 5, to automatically distribute and replicate data across nodes and regions. The result is a system that’s not just distributed, but intelligent and context-aware, dynamically optimizing workload placement to ensure AI agents have fast, reliable, and consistent access to data, even during site-level failures.
Organizations gain the flexibility to modernize applications and execute high-concurrency AI initiatives securely on a unified and trusted infrastructure.
As AI initiatives move from experimentation into production, resilient data infrastructure becomes a strategic advantage rather than simply an operational requirement. Organizations that can maintain consistent performance, continuous availability, and global data consistency are better positioned to deploy AI applications with confidence while supporting long-term business growth.
Related Announcement
Get started with CockroachDB on IBM LinuxONE
If downtime impacts your business, it’s time to rethink the data infrastructure that supports it. Partner with IBM and Cockroach Labs to build resilient, secure, always-on platforms on LinuxONE Rockhopper 5.
Explore CockroachDB on LinuxONE: https://www.ibm.com/products/linuxone-5
Learn how CockroachDB and IBM LinuxONE power resilient AI infrastructure. Contact Kyle Basile, Sr. Partner Sales Manager, IBM, at Cockroach Labs, kyle.basile@cockroachlabs.com.
Kyle Basile is Sr. Partner Sales Manager, IBM, at Cockroach Labs.
