This is a pretty big announcement as far as enterprise acceptance goes. This really shows that IBM has quite a bit of faith in linux and are willing to put their money where their mouth is. They are offering a zSeries mainframe and iSeries midrange server. The z800 will start at about $400,000, which is a little over half of what a similarly equiped non-linux z900 would cost. Kudus to IBM. I think this is a big step.

--jeremy
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver..._01-25-02.html
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver.../800linux.html

Thanks .. WE appreciate that. (now you know who I work for)

I agree with you as well. I was proud to here they are doing that. I knew it was coming sometime soon, but not quite this soon.

I had to laugh when I read this story. IBM painted tux on the sidewalks all around San Francisco. Seems the city wasn't too happy. $20,000 cleanup and a $100,000 fine. That's probably cheaper than most IBM ad campaigns anyway.

--jeremy

http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/industr...eut/index.html

You also have to take into account that corporate interest in Mainframes has become more buoyant since the 'Linux on a mainframe' rumours started.

It's going to be very good for corporations that need the data power (like Olympic games websites etc.)


Edge

im proud to find out thay it was IBM that made the mainframe, and im glad its a stand alone LINUX machine. GO LINUX

--~~>>

The main reason I'm delving into Linux right now on my PC at home is so I can get experienced with the environment and OS in case that happens to make me more marketable at work. Right now our shop has very little, if any, involvement with Linux. Most of our software runs on our mainframes. For a while that was just legacy stuff, but now there's more and more talk about running Java applications and web servers on the mainframe under the native operating system z/OS (which now has incorporated significant Unix functions completely on its own). But there have been "rumblings" about Linux here for a while. The shop's pretty secure and they're afraid of the idea of running an "open source" operating system, but I have a feeling that Linux is going to get really big here and I want to be ready to move on it.

The zSeries machines are not "standalone Linux machines." Far from it, in fact. The zSeries machines are capable of running multiple system images on a single piece of hardware, including BOTH legacy MVS systems and Linux systems.

The beauty of this configuration is that you can run several Linux servers on a single physical machine, which centralizes your hardware and also reduces administration costs. Also, most of the time, individual Linux machines are not running at 100% CPU, so the zSeries's advanced hardware resource management allows these consolidated systems to share unused resources.

Combined with IBM's Virtual Machine software (VM), this could allow you to run literally hundreds of Linux servers on a single zSeries machine. And since the Linux images use different processors than the MVS OS does, you can run these hundreds of images on the same box as your mainframe applications. And because they're all on the same box, a lot of the networking can be done via dedicated hardware channels in the same box, instead of even having to go over network cables. (IBM calls it "Hipersockets") A lot of our applications have clients connecting to scattered servers which connect to the mainframe to access legacy data. All that can be done at hardware speeds if the servers are all virtual images in the same cabinet.

Neat stuff. Sorry to drag up an old thread, but I work with software on the zSeries machines and we were kicking around the idea of moving our DRDA connectivity servers which allow our distributed applications to talk to the mainframe from a bunch of Win2K boxes to Linux images running on the same physical hardware as the mainframe systems and using hardware networking to both boost performance and reduce complexity.

this maybe an old thread, but to me, and ubb3r newbie with linux, this is awsome news.

i am very happy to see this and glad IBM beat HP to the punch on this one. im not a huge fan of HP, but have not had any problems with IBM except the layout of their ugly laptops.