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Re: [Linux] IBM: Linux on the Mainframe is Gaining Steam

Rex Ballard <rex.ballard@xxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> On Jun 25, 10:21 pm, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>> IBM defends cost of buying and maintaining a mainframe
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | IBM defended the mainframe as a box that doesn't take up much space and is an
>> | ideal consolidation platform, especially for Linux. By running virtualised
>> | Linux instances on top of z/VM, the mainframe's virtualisation operating
>> | system, Stallings argued that a mainframe's TCO is better with as few as 100
>> | distributed servers.
> 
> IBM had almost killed the mainframe.  The Kingston NY facility was
> closed in 1994.  Many were predicting the total end of the mainframe.
> IBM then decided to put Unix and MVS on the same machine, and make it
> possible to run both at the same time.  VM/CMS had been around for a
> long time, but IBM decided to streamline the VM, which made OS/390
> even easier to manage in both Unix and MVS mode.  With Z/OS, the
> further streamlined VM into ZVM.  A skunkworks project to emulate OS/
> 370 on a Linux PC was followed by a port of Linux to the emulator.
> This Linux ran pretty well on the new system, and then IBM officially
> endorsed the Linux ZVM module.  It was actually a
> good fit.  Many corporations had offloaded much of the User Interface
> to other systems.  Linux applications were designed to be
> distributed.  The Beowulf cluster had shown the advantages of
> clusters.
> 
>> | And, he said that Linux on the mainframe is gaining steam. About 25% of the
>> | MIPS IBM ships on the mainframe run Linux, he said.
>> `----
> 
> These days it's not unusual for large corporations to order a
> Mainframe and plan in advance to have Linux VMs connected to Mainframe
> VMs, usually using WMQ (aka MQ Series).  This is a great solution for
> providing a web interface to CICS applications.  There is also the
> HATS interface for WebSphere, which can also interconnect MVS, IMS,
> and TSO applications to Linux.
> 
>> http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid80...
>>
> 

I know that we use IBM mainframes, with virtualised linux instances, for
web hosting.  It's a good solution, although I haven't seen anyone do
the maths with respect to power consumption versus an equivalently
powerful cluster of eg., ARM machines or something like that.

It's quite interesting that the mainframe has survived where the
mini-computer was, in the end, taken out by Microsoft Windows.
Incidentally, it was the mini-computers which were killing mainframes,
not IBM...  The combination which proved the saviour for all of this,
though, was the internet and unix applications.  The internet's very
open stack means that pretty much any kind of device can connect to
it successfully, and equally, as you say above, the capability of unix
applications to run in a distributed and/or networked way, with clean
separation from the underlying hardware has meant that the generation
of applications created during the FSF/GNU era are the ones which are
reaching their Zenith now.  Microsoft's PC-centric, vertically integrated,
stand-alone, single-user, local-access-only applications increasingly
look like a left-over from the 1990s.


-- 
| Mark Kent   --   mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk          |
| Cola faq:  http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/   |
| Cola trolls:  http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/                        |
| My (new) blog:  http://www.thereisnomagic.org                        |

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