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Major Linux Deployments
bstadil writes: "In the early days of Linux' entry into the mainstream (late 1998) Slashdot covered interesting wins for the OS like Burlington Coat Factory. Maybe its time to do it again. Within 48 hours Linux has made two HUGE inroads that merits mentioning. The first is the announcement of Home Depot plannig 90.000 Cash Registers running linux and Telia in Scandinavia replacing 70 Sun servers + Solaris with one IBM mainframe running Linux. One machine serving 800,000 internet accounts." ZDNet has a few more details.
I went to Home Depot to order a sheet of Formica for a project and not one person in the store knew how to order the stuff. They had samples and catalogs, I just couldn't buy it. I waited for almost an hour while they paged everyone in the store. I ended up going to Menards.
Methinks you are not aware of VM.
/. readers.)
VM stands for "virtual machine." It gives the impression of running on a real piece of hardware. VM is so good at virtualizing the machine, it was used for OS development. (It really started as an internal OS development tool, not a standalone OS.)
A hacker working on one virtual machine can't trash a different virtual machine, or the root machine (which may also be virtual). It's like process protection, but extended to the entire OS environment.
390 series hardware uptime is measured in years. There is so much error checking and redundancy. They rarely go down for hardware problems. And when I say rare, I mean many years, as in 10 or 20. (Sorry, I don't have the exact number handy, but it is bigger than the age of many
You are missing the point. Every user gets their own virtual computer to play with. They have root on their own computer. But they do not have root on anyone else's virtual machine (nothing to do with java :-) In fact, they cannot access other people's machines at all. Basically, it's almost as if every user had their own physical box hosted at Telia.
Telia does not have to maintain any of these virtual machines. All they need to do is create one when a user signs up. After that, the user has complete control over their own box.
This is really cool. But the real question is whether it's cost effective. 1500 individual boxes would be definitely several orders of magnitude faster than a single mainframe.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
What is the most likely result of the following; Home Depot, Burlington Coat Factory and Musicland adopting GNU/Linux based POS systems:
#1) Teams of internal developers making CVS submissions to various projects, bugfixes and kernel hacks?
#2) Donations to various GNU/Linux or Free Software projects that are 'in line' with the financial where-with-all of these organizations considering the $ 'saved'
#3) The VP of IT of each company gets a massive bonus for saving The Company money. The whole Board of Directors buys another Mercedes.
I hope it is Case#1 or Case#2. We know that it takes alot of effort to convince people to 'get' the reasons and value of Free Software. One of the major flaws of the GNU license (IMHO) is that there is not method or action for people who have no intention of 'contributing' to A) Admit they dont care to participate or B) Mechanism for compensation for the efforts of others or C) insert-your-idea-here-similar-to-above
My fear is that Free Software is going to turn into a subsidy system for Big Business... the least they could do is say Thank-You.. or send RMS, Havoc, Linus, Alan Cox, a discount card. They (and thousands of others) have saved these companies from the M$ Tax surely they 'owe something back.'
... but I was in a Home Despot, er, Depot last week and I could have sworn the little floor terminals and POS systems were HP pizza-box workstations. The GUI certainly didn't scream MS (more like (n)curses). I can imagine that unix thin clients (virtually dumb terms) make a lot of sense for this use (high reliability (hw and sw), low power consumption, ease of development). True, x86 hw is cheaper than proprietary unix hardware, and win32 probably costs less in bulk than HPUX or whatever, but then how much revenue do you lose when all the cash registers BSOD?
Now up steps linux, a POSIX environment than runs on cheap x86 hardware and is available for free with a full suite of programming tools. Switching is definitely not a hard decision to make if you're already using a Unix-terminal-based solution.
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News for Geeks in Austin, TX
And having Linux in cash registers benefits Linux because...?
Simple answer: It doesn't have any benefit for desktop users. Do you normally think about the various embedded OSs that are used in cars and industrial facilities?
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Allan Joergensen - http://www.nowhere.dk
I vaguely recall reading Linux Possibly Ported to IBM Mainframes, which raised the possiblity of running more than one instance of Linux. The eWeek article quotes an IBM exec. as saying, "Telia will initially host more than 1,500 customers through individual Linux images, with near-instantaneous scalability up to 30,000 images."
This sounds like a colossal maintenance burden. I mean, I guess it's easier to maintain 30,000 installations of Linux on one machine than 30,000 machines, but it has to be harder than maintaining 30,000 accounts on [less than 30,000] installations of Linux. Does each user get his own root password? What happens when the next version of SuSE comes out?
IBM did put a lot of work into the S/390 port, and there is work at IBM at improving Linux on PowerPC (including compiler work for GCC). So, it's not totally free for IBM, but with all of the base Linux work done, it does save a lot of cash...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Still better than any Menards...
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"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
The reason why Burlington Coat factory was such a big deal was because Linux, at that time, was a relative unknown to high-level IT management.
Any kind of enterprise-wide deployment a few years ago, be it Butt Scrapers 'R' Us or IBM, would have been celebrated, and rightly so, as a milestone for Linux adoption.
Nowadays, with all of the overexposure from the mainstream media on down, enterprise deployments have become ho-hum. I think most of us are now waiting on widespread consumer adoption as the next logical wave-maker for the Linux community.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
The best thing about this (from my point of view), is not Telia going with Linux, it's IBM selling a big chunk of machinery with Linux on it. As long as the deployment isn't a total distaster it'll be a real good thing both for linux (running on *big* systems), *and* for IBM, *selling* - for money using linux. Hopefully a few of these types of sales will help cement IBMs commitment to both linux and open source...
Win win win!
Mike.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
OK, thanks, I didn't know that, because I couldn't find it in the man page. vi is a very good editor, but has a far steeper learning curve. That's what I was objecting to, the original poster saying that mainframes are hard to use, when Unix is just as difficult in different ways. The white space is just to separate the command 'change foo to bar' is what it translates as.
Forgot one thing. c 'confusing syntax' 'simple syntax' would be the way to avoid white space problems on ISPF.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Where did the 800,000 accounts come from? I read that the 390 would have 1,500 web servers in essence. Since it is really just one big server acting as 1500. And then there is the quote in the article saying now it will only take 5 minutes to add a server. YOU AREN'T ADDING A SERVER. You are basically creating a new directory. So yes it is quicker but you take some resources away from the other servers. Also while 390's do not go down if this guy does talk about impact now. I mean true more than likely she will never fail as the 3 million redundant levels of everything page IBM before anything fails, but if it does go down you just had the equivalent of 1500 servers go down. oh well.
I am 31337 or something.
at first the 90.000 Cash Registers seemed like a lot until people realized that the actual number was 90 with with 3 zeros after the decimal.
note: i am aware that some countries use decimals instead of commas.
Not only is this cool from a technical standpoint but it's tough to underestimate the value of news like this from a PR standpoint. These kinds of things, when discussed around the pointy headed management kind of get Linux in there in a subconscious sort of way that says "Oh ya, that thing that runs that ISP in Europe somewhere for 800,000 users. Must be pretty good."
Not only that, but Europe is so much more sexy than home depot. Next thing we need is some mainframe installs at Victoria Secret!
Intergalactics - A pretty cool strategy game in a java applet
Different images in an S/390 / z900 are separated from each other in hardware and the VM software. The only way to circumvent this would be to somehow gain access to the VM control programs. You can be damn sure that these folks will be air-gapping the console and admin systems from public networks. VM controls cannot be accessed from the systems VM runs, period. (IIRC, this restriction is enforced in hardware.) In addition, the images cannot access the resources (storage or memory) of each other unless explicitly configured to do so in VM. The restrictions are good enough that mainframes have been running the same OS architecture for decades and I do not recall a single security breach of this nature.
SirWired
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Best Buy is buying Musicland, the parent company of Sam Goody which is also mentioned in the original article as one of the largest POS Linux deployments currently in place. Maybe Best Buy will be switching to Musicland inventory system. Then maybe Best Buy will start selling Linux boxen, or at least boxen with no installed OS, so we can save on the Windows tax. That bring those eMachines down to practically nothing, of course, you wouldn't be able to claim the MSN $400 rebate if you weren't running Windows.
By the way, isn't ICL's slogan: "We put the S in POS" B^)
Work for Change & GET PAID!
WRT credit checks by employers: Are you sure they aren't just making sure in debt up to your neck so they know for a fact that they can jack you around as much as they want, without fear that you'll walk since you will be desperate to keep up on the payments?
As far as this or any other hiring practice affecting my decision to shop at Home Depot... I'm more likely to be (positively) influenced by the fact that they are a major supporter of Linux than I am to care that the people who work there are subject to privacy invasions. Maybe if the workers unionized or organized or supported politicians with brains, it wouldn't be a problem. But after much reflection I have decided that the average American deserves exactly what he or she is getting.
I do not have a signature
So, next time you make a run to CompUSA, praise the AIX terminals, and scorn the IBM POS POS (Point of Sale Piece of S#!&)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
The company I work for is (unfortunately) going to roll our POS platform out on eNT. We get to give Microsoft at least $1*10e7 for the privilege, and they still have no idea how we're going to cram this whole monolithic Win32 app into these pathetically small 120MHz 586s with only 16MB RAM and 1.2GB.
And nobody wanted to hear Linux when it was suggested, offered, and screamed. "It's just not Microsoft, and our corporate direction is Microsoft." and the ever popular "Well, we have a lot of resources we can tap into for Windows support." Never mind that the AMOUNT of support required drops exponentially...
If that's our corporate direction, we need a new corporate compass. Sheesh.
John
P.S. Mozilla 0.6 rocks!
John
John
John
Of course, maybe I'm too young (at 33 no less! :-) to remember the mainframe days very well, but in my recent experience these days, big iron always has a little buddy somewhere waiting to help out when a boot drive fails, a router blows, whatever. I guess I'm just not used to one big box doing everything. I just can't get away from the notion that three smaller machines behind some sort of load balancing deal is better than one big machine doing everything. It just makes more sense to me.
Oh well. So much for thinking outside the box. Anyone got a VAX for sale?
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Listen, genius... Unless some boneheaded sysadmin for some bizarre reason decided to physically connect the admin systems to the "outside world", (this would have to be explicitly configued in the I/O Control Program), the security is foolproof, period. End of story. A breach of the control systems by user images is physically impossible. The system hardware simply would not allow it, no matter how the program was written.
I did not say, "provided the security is good enough." The security already is impenetrable, right out of the box (er... crate). No OS patches, no BugTraq-reading. The trusted sysadmin would have to break it on purpose to do anything. And if you can't trust your sysadmin, clustering won't help.
It is far more likely that a clustered system would utterly collapse than this one "basket" would. Here is an anology: Let's say you have one billion dollars to move from point A to point B, in $20 bills. You can either load the bills into a fleet of NYC street taxi's (with the doors locked), or into a truck armored (and weaponed) like an M1A1 tank, and four completely redundant engines. Which would you choose? Multiple, unreliable, boxes that have been proven notoriously hard to secure; or one single, easy to administer, rock-solid box, with security that has been proven over decades to be bullet-proof.
I'm too busy making money selling Linux to big companies to rebut your claims. Sorry.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
> Linux is not designed to support a wide range of different software applications, but excels with fairly straightforward tasks such as giving access to Internet sites.
:) But it's nice to see IBM shipping a supercomputer w/ Linux, using their new hack to run several Linuxes under VM:s...
So webserving is straightforward, and I can not run Quake and GIMP on Linux, I guess?
Anyway, for any scandinave, Telia switching to Linux is no big deal, since Telia is the devil itself anyway (Like AT&T in the US I guess?)
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Won't it be fun when someone figures a way to hack them using nothing more than their own barcode scanner... I'm sure all this Cue Cat hacking will come in handy here... Just think, put one of your own home made bar codes on a purchase, and when it is scanned 10% is taken off the sub-total.
With the comming of photo quality printers for every home, distribution of these barcode images would proliferate like, ummmm, MP3's...
Now if only we can convince the Home Depot to carry computer parts we will all be happy...
On another note with the Home Depot... I just got a call from my lawer telling me that The Home Depot has settled out of court with me for a whopping $1500 to compensate me for the broken finger one of their employees was kind enough to give me.
All this aside, I would imagine that having Linux on their cash registers would be a first step towards the Linuxing of all their computer systems... I guess this could allow them to change prices on the fly... Someone updates the cost of a hammer in Tulsa and across the Home Depot network, the increase ( or less likely the decrease) in price is instantly updated on all their cash registers...
Of course, I will want to get my hands on one of these Linux cash registers because I need one that can preform complex boolian operations, to sort out the tax structure here in Canada, as well as keep me entertained through a full T1 internet connection.
Who'd a thunk selling screws could be so complex... Will we now have to refer to the Home Depot cashiers as Cashflow System Operators?...
Hmmm CSO has a nice ring to it...
flinging poop since 1969
Software, free or proprietary, needs users in order to thrive. 90,000 cash registers nationwide in a high-availability situation is a lot of users.
I gather from the TechWeb article that Home Depot contracted with Red Hat for some or all of the work on these cash registers. It's not clear whether HD and/or RHAT have made the changes for the "stripped-down version" of Linux available. Other businesses may be able to benefit from their work.
You ask "Where did the 800,000 accounts come from? ". The article reads: The Linux win, which is expected to be announced later on Thursday, will mean that all of TeliaNet's 800,000 private Internet customers in Scandinavia and 1,000 corporate clients, will be serviced by a single supercomputer in Copenhagen
Help fight continental drift.
If Linux is used in registers, there has to be some form of UI, even if it's not one that is really seen. I'd be more apt to think that they'd be using X, everyone from the DMV (at least, here) to the grocery store has been installing new registers and/or customer service terminals that use a GUI, and if this is indeed what they are doing, they could add to development. Remember, if the registers are all Linux, there could be use for the server being Linux, or at least something UNIX. If the server is something UNIX and the company writing the Point of Sale, for the Linux box, is also writing the store management and region management software for the inventory control, accounts payable/receivable, payroll and other HR, etc, then they might want to develop it ALL on the same platform. It would be cheaper for the developers, they don't have to purchase costly development tools, and everyone develops for the same platform so workarounds or methods for one app could be applied to another. Depending on the contract that Home Depot has with the software developer, it could be easier to maintain the system too, since remote management tools actually work for Linux. This at least means that app development will occur, and likely some tweaks on window managers, video drivers (depending on what kind of stuff they want to use), and possibly installation of some of the GPL or at least free office suites, to let these managers use their adminstrative computers for basic stuff like word processing and spreadsheets, which could also be integrated into the system. There are lots of possible benefits. They might just not seem incredibly obvious.
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
? ??9 hacker on one good box is going to bupkiss against Big Iron- this would be akin to attacking the moon with a slingshot. An article was linked off of here a few months ago about the successful porting of linux to an IBM 390. The thing has INSANE bandwidth, zero downtime, is almost totally faultless, and on top of that, the Linux system images can be restored on the fly. You could hack one instance, but you'd still have to bypass the mainframe security in order to bring down the system.... and you have to be physically ON SITE with a hammer to do that. A mainframe doesn't NEED to load balance, unlike the Mere Mortal machines so far beneath it- these things are built to handle loads so severe that the slashdot effect looks like a gerbil fart.
I think the company made a fabulous decision- I'd rather have a Battleship than a fleet of rowboats with rifles doing the same job.
This is Big Blue Iron we're talking about, not a bunch of individual PCs that just happen to be stuffed into a single rack.
30,000 Linux OS images on a 390 is no harder to manage than those as MVS images, and not that much (sic) harder than a single one. Sure, there's a lot of user accounts to manage, and a mainframe port brings in complexity issues that aren't important for a one-per-desktop box, but you certainly don't have issues like 30,000 individual root passwords. It's a hell of a lot easier to admin than a Beowulf cluster.
Lots of users with their own image of a shared (and protected) OS is what mainframes are all about.
This is more than just creating a new directory. When a new "server" is set up, it will get separate instance of Linux, completely separated from all other images. From the point of view of the customer, they will have the whole machine to themselves. If they want to rm -rf /, it isn't a problem for any other image. This is the big strength of a VM-based system. Also, the unbelivably flexible load balancing software can be configured to give a certain image an absolute allocation of system resources, (I/O bandwidth, CPU cycles, memory, whatever) and you can be positive that you will always have it. Any shortage of capacity can be anticipated far ahead of time and fixed in short order by setting up a Parallel Sysplex of multiple boxes. (After you have somehow exhausted the huge amount of internal on-the-fly expansion capacity.)
Also, it is FAR more likely that something like the power company or the outside net connection will go down before the mainframe itself fails. These are designed for ZERO downtime. So a company deploying one of these is far more likely to lose sleep worrying about external systems than the mainframe itself.
As a mainframer I would just like to point out:
1) JCL is not equivalent to a batch/shell script, more like a control file that tells a program what files to use, so is more like, say, smb.conf. Try telling me that that is easy to use. The closest thing to (g)awk on the mainframe would be Rexx, which, although not perfect is a no-brainer to get things done and has almost no learning curve (unlike anything Unix-related). And things like the ISPF Edit facility is several times easier to use than vi or Emacs e.g. want to change one string to another: 'c foo bar'. What's the vi equivalent? Dunno, and I can't find it in the extremely confusing man page, although it will be some 733t gibberish no doubt. ISPF help is a lot easier to navigate. ISPF does a have a GUI facility, but few companies are prepared to fork out for it.
2) Generalisations like that are exactly the same as saying that Unix coders all have huge bushy beards and wash once a month whether they need it or not.
OS/390 is several orders of magnitude better than Linux, but it costs a great deal.
1) Got to agree. mainframe hardware management is superb.
2) You've contradicted yourself here. Mainframes can very easily be clustered together.
In conclusion, you obviously last worked on a mainframe when IBM was still getting used to not being a monopoly, the improvements in software and general attitude to customers from when I first started 11 years ago is great.
Last thing, don't think I'm anti-Unix (I'm posting this from Linux), I just get annoyed when people forget all the irritating things about Unix when they criticise mainframes.
that is also dictates what you can do OFF the clock as well. Say a responsible user gets off work Fri night, goes to a concert or movie, smokes a joint, relaxes and has a great time. Monday morning, when your perfectly straight again, able to safely work with dangerous equipment, your going to test positive. Testing positive != stoned.
I'm just pissed (pun intended) because they just started random drug tests here - should I play employment roulette tonight? Current strategy - wait untill tested, then party like hell.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I wonder if they thought at all about 'single point of failure' issues of putting all the power in one big box?
]-R/-\])!!!!111!!!!1!!
cpeterso
Everyone on Slashdot knows that..
cpeterso