At LinuxWorld San Francisco earlier this month, Zend Technologies announced a broadening of its partnership with IBM intending to boost growth of production-ready PHP applications.

With deeper integration between Zend Core for IBM and IBM DB2, the plan is that companies should now be able to deploy open source PHP and DB2 across a variety of hardware and operating systems, and obtain support from a single source. Included are new support for DB2 Connect technology providing access to i5/OS and z/OS DB2 data servers and support for System i Linux partitions and the System i-attached BladeCenter and System x Servers.

Also included are enhanced IBM DB2 Express-C capabilities in Zend Core for IBM, the certified PHP solution from Zend Technologies, and unified, single-source support for the integrated PHP and DB2 solution stack.

Zend Core for IBM provides a certified, enhanced and supported PHP-based application development and deployment stack which includes Apache, PHP, Zend Framework and DB2 Express-C. DB2 Express-C is IBM’s industrial strength hybrid relational-XML data server providing customers access to enterprise-grade features such as data replication, high availability clustering and off-site disaster recovery. The result is a highly-scalable web application infrastructure.

With the addition of support for Linux partitions and support for the System i-attached BladeCenter and System x Servers, System i users will be able to consolidate multiple PHP application servers and DB2 Express-C data servers onto a single hardware platform with unified administration and management.

“Zend Core for IBM is a great solution for customers needing to plan for future growth,” says Mark de Visser, chief marketing officer at Zend. “People can start with an entry-level System x system and later scale their systems to System p, System i and even System z hardware using the cross-platform consistency of the Zend Core solution.”

Customers seeking support for demanding mission critical applications can purchase Zend annual support subscriptions for a PHP stack with DB2 Express-C data servers. All services are delivered by Zend and backed by the global technical resources of IBM.

Zend Core for IBM is available today from Zend, while details for enhanced support, DB2 Express-C, DB2 Connect and new System i capabilities can be obtained from Zend partners.

Frank Booty, industry reporter.