Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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
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
> 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.
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.
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.